ASEPTIC SURGERY

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1785, 22 July 1926, Page 2

ASEPTIC SURGERY

A LOST ART THAT HAS BEEN RECOVERED. In an article in the Nineteenth Century on “Aseptic Surgery in the Fourteenth Century.” G. D. Hindley, M.C., iM.D., writes: “When it suggested that aseptic surgery is really one of the old lost arts now recovered, something more than the mere assertion of so very unlikely a thesis seems to be required. For Listerism has been hailed by the civilised world ms one of the greatest discoveries of an ingenious age, and the originality of this discovery can hardly be impugned. Let it therefore be stated, with all the solemnity that so remarkable a fact demands, that in the early fourteenth century they were men who not only knew that wounds could be healed without suppuration, but who practised continually and with marked success, that cleanly letting alone the wounds which is the basis of aseptic surgery to-day. They used as mild antiseptic application warm wine alone. The story of the evolution of antiseptic methods by Lister in the nineteenth century has often been told. His ingenious and determined interpretation of Pasteur’s work on microbes in connection with fermentation and putrefaction has been the theme of innumerable orations, lectures, essays, and writings during the 50 odd years that have passed since his early publications. But the wonderful story of Henry de Mondeville’s work, developed from what was really little more than a hint by his teacher and predecessor, Theodoric, has yet to be told in its entirely.”