It was only decades later that Lister abandoned the carbolic spray when the German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch developed a technique for staining and growing bacteria in a Petri dish (named after his assistant Julius Petri). This enabled Koch to match particular microorganisms to specific diseases and advance the theory that bacteria exist as distinct species, each producing a unique clinical syndrome. Using his method, Koch showed that airborne pathogens were not the main culprit of wound infection, which meant that sterilizing the air was futile.
This is why Lister is a central figure to whole history of surgical intervention in medicine.
