Like many of his colleagues, Lister recognized that excessive inflammation often preceded the onset of a septic condition. Once this occurred, a patient would develop a fever. The underlying factor linking the two seemed to be heat. Inflammation was localized heat, whereas the fever was systemic heat. In the 1850s, however, preventing either was difficult because wounds rarely healed cleanly, to the extent that many doctors considered “laudable pus” essential to the healing process. Moreover, there was a debate within the medical community as to whether inflammation was in fact “normal” or a
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