Listerism, its Decline and its Persistence: the Introduction of aseptic surgical Techniques in three British Teaching Hospitals, 1890–99

The view that Joseph Lister's introduction of antisepsis was a revolutionary act is an old one.Thus John Tyndall wrote in 1881 "Living germs . . .as Schwann was the first to prove, are the causes of putrefaction.Lister extended the generalization of Schwann from dead matter to living matter, and by this apparently simple step revolutionized the art of surgery.He changed it, in fact, from an art into a science."'Watson Cheyne, Lister's assistant in Edinburgh and King's College Hospital, London, continued the theme in his exhaustive monograph on antiseptic surgery.2His book not only apotheosizes Listerism as practised at the beginning of the 1880s, but marks its apogee, as antisepsis underwent no fundamental change-in principle-thereafter, despite major technical developments such as the abandonment of the spray and the substitution of mercurial antiseptics for carbolic acid.Indeed, from the middle of the decade a rapidly increasing proportion of the innovations in wound treatment and operative techniques aimed at the prevention of infection were deliberately characterized by their describers not as antiseptic, but as aseptic.What was the nature of this shift from antisepsis to asepsis?3 Was it a seamless, evolutionary development, as epitomized by Schimmelbusch in the preface of his book on asepsis-"the present work is nothing more than an extension of that beneficient idea