Lister had reason to be strict with his students and his assistants. Every successful procedure and every successful application of antiseptic dressing served as evidence against the doctrine of spontaneous generation. Life did not develop de novo, as his students could plainly see when infection failed to develop. His reports in The Lancet might not have been enough to convince some surgeons of the validity of the germ theory, but his students saw with their own eyes the antiseptic system working every time they accompanied him onto the wards. If seeing was believing, Lister was creating a
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