Lister took away from Pasteur’s work the idea that it wasn’t the air as such but its constituent of microbial life that was the source of hospital infection. In those early days, he probably thought that the contamination of the air and the infection of the wound were attributable to the invasion of a single organism. Lister could not yet conceive of the vast number of airborne germs and their varying degrees of virulence, nor did he understand that germs could be transmitted in many different ways and by many different media. Lister came to the vital realization that he couldn’t prevent a
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