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June 16 - July 7, 2019
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE
The best that can be said about Victorian hospitals is that they were a slight improvement over their Georgian predecessors. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement when one considers that a hospital’s “Chief Bug-Catcher”—whose job it was to rid the mattresses of lice—was paid more than its surgeons.
His appointment to the chair of surgery in 1850 at the age of thirty-two so offended his senior colleague Richard Quain that the latter refused to talk to Erichsen for fifteen years. Such is the timelessness of hospital politics.
Erysipelas was one of four major infections that plagued hospitals in the nineteenth century. The other three were hospital gangrene (ulcers that lead to decay of flesh, muscle, and bone), septicemia (blood poisoning), and pyemia (development of pus-filled abscesses).
Collect all 4!
As John Thomas Arlidge—a Victorian doctor who took a keen interest in occupational medicine—observed, “Dust does not kill suddenly, but settles, year after year, a little more firmly into the lungs, until at length a case of plaster is formed. Breathing becomes more and more difficult and depressed, and finally ceases.”
On the HMS Saturn, a malignant ulcer appeared on the tip of a seaman’s penis. After several days of agonizing pain during which the wound blackened and festered, the organ finally fell off. The surgeon on board reported that the “whole length of the urethra to the bulb sloughed away, and also the scrotum, leaving the testes and spermatic vessels barely covered with cellular substance.” As if the inevitable outcome needed underlining, the surgeon added, “He died.”
AUGH!!!
“Every patient, even the most degraded, should be treated with the same care and regard as though he were the Prince of Wales himself.”
His experiments established what is now considered one of the cornerstones of biology: Only life begets life. In a speech on his findings delivered to the Sorbonne, Pasteur said, “Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment.”
*heart eyes*
Lister came to the vital realization that he couldn’t prevent a wound from having contact with germs in the atmosphere. So he turned his attention to finding a means of destroying microorganisms within the wound itself, before infection could set in.
<3<3
