The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 1927. A SPRAY OF CARBOLIC ACID

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 16, 9 April 1927, Page 8

The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 1927. A SPRAY OF CARBOLIC ACID

A CENTURY ago the practice of surgery was the most stupid of all the professions. Surgeons, it is true, did their work with skill, but they did not know that they themselves and their instruments and accessories were the causes of an appalling mortality. No one could easily count the number of graves the world over that have been filled with the *tnute evidence of the shortcomings and lack of perfect medical knowledge. The great surgeons of those bygone days are not to be blamed for the grim toll of their ignorance. It simply had not occurred to them that an unseen and intangible assassin lurked in their deft hands, on keen blades, and in the very air they breathed in the operating rC|Om. The germ theory had not dawned on the questing mind of genius. Fifty years later, light came to them and a multitude of •successors out of Glasgow where a cultured Quaker, a man of Essex, already famous as a teacher of surgery, introduced and perfected the discovery and practice of antiseptics. The supreme surgeon in modern history was Joseph Lister Lister, whose birth a hundred years ago this week has been celebrated with a nation’s tribute, and whose imperishable memory will be universally honoured at Edinburgh in July by grateful representatives of his profession. There, and on that occasion, New Zealand will be represented by the Dean of the Medical Faculty at Otago University, Sir Lindo Ferguson. Expert technicians alone could measure with exactitude the extent and value of the gift of clean, quickhealing surgery that Lord Lister gave to the nations. But it is not necessary for laymen to exercise technical jargon. Enough to say that the first Listerian spray of carbolic acid in a surgeon’s theatre destroyed the bacteria that formerly had been a prolific cause of death in thousands of surgical cases, and began a new era in the remarkable history of surgery. Thus, to-day, even a small country like New Zealand can have a formidable record of some twenty thousand surgical operations a year without any cause for public whimpering at the mortality rate. Occasionally, of course, there are errors and carelessness with the subsequent necessity for clumsy surgeons to blame nature instead of themselves for bad results and protracted suppuration of wounds, but these, happily, are few and far between. And they may be left to the scathing condemnation such as famous surgeons like Dr. Mayo has bestowed upon them. Nor is it at all necessary hot/ to elaborate the fame of Lord Lister. A proud nation made him one of the original members of the esteemed and unsullied Order of Merit, and his name is high among the immortals. This age has greater need of studying the lessons of a devout Quaker’s life and mighty work for mankind. The sarcasm of the Psalmist cannot be applied to Lister’s memory: “So long as thou doest well unto thyself, men will speak good of thee.” He is and will ever be remembered for the permanence of his achievements. And what are the lessons for this generation ? Surely not any increase in the record of surgical operations, and a tendency to probe every obscure disease with an antiseptic knife. Death can only be deferred, never defeated. What we all require to do is to extend the frontiers of life by simple living, wholesome pleasures, hard work, and common sense while medical science, without a scramble for gain, seeks patiently to conquer the scourges of cancer, tuberculosis, influenza, rheumatism and the pandemic diseases which ravage a foolish world.