LISTER AND HIS DISCIPLES
attended to his instruments and assisted in his experiments, and
she tried to cure his unfortunate habit of unpunctuality, a defect
which implied no lack of diligence, but rather the reverse, for he
became so deeply absorbed in his work that he was prone to forget
his next appointment. Agnes Syme deserves the highest praise
for the part she played in advancing the success of her famous
husband.
At this period in his career, the scientific side of surgery en-
gaged his attention, and he investigated, in the foot of a frog
captured at Duddingston Loch, " The Early Stages of Inflamma-
tion," communicating the results in a paper to the Royal Society
in 1857. Next year he wrote a paper on " The Coagulation of
the Blood." Practice, however, was slow to appear, as we gather
from the fact that Mrs. Lister spoke ofcc Poor Joseph and his one
patient." Lister's election to the Chair of Clinical Surgery in
Glasgow was therefore opportune. It offered a wide field for
surgery and a freedom to develop his own ideas without the super-
vision of his father-in-law, valuable as that had been in the early
years. So in 1860 Lister removed to Glasgow, which was to
become the scene of his epoch-making discovery.
His wards in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, built upon the
site of an old burial ground crammed with the coffins of the
victims of the cholera epidemic of 1849, were " some of the most
unhealthy in the kingdom." Sir John Erichsen in London and
Sir J. Y. Simpson in Edinburgh had each attributed the sources
of the hospital gangrene, erysipelas, and pyaemia which then
decimated surgical wards to what was called " hospitalism," an
evil then much greater in hospitals than in private houses, and
greatest of all in the largest hospitals.
The Antiseptic System
His researches on inflammation had led Lister to suspect that
decomposition, or putrefaction, as it was sometimes called, was
the cause of suppuration and infection of wounds, and that the
cause was not merely the gases of the air, but something carried
by the air. It was the professor of chemistry in Glasgow, Thomas
Anderson, who drew Lister's attention to the work of Pasteur*
Pasteur, as we have already noted (p. 284) had shown that putre-
faction was a fermentation, caused by microscopic organisms
which could be transmitted by air. To Lister, Pasteur's discoveries
323