Germ Theory and its Applications to Medicine & On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery.

"Time is the best appraiser of scientific work, and I am not unaware that an industrial discovery rarely produces all its fruits in the hands of its first inventor."^1a MARX CARNEGIE POINCARÉ SCHUMPETER GHANDI

"In short, fermentation is a very general phenomenon. It is life without air, or life without free oxygen, or, more generally still, it is the result of a chemical process accomplished on a fermentable substance capable of producing heat by its decomposition . . ."^1b

"To demonstrate experimentally that a microscopic organism actually is the cause of a disease and the agent of contagion, I know no other way, in the present state of Science, than to subject the microbe (the new and happy term introduced by M. Sedillot) to the method of cultivation out of the body."^1c*

"All things are hidden, obscure and debatable if the cause of the phenomena be unknown, but everything is clear if this cause be known."^1d ARISTOTLE

"At the very beginning of these researches, for they reveal an entirely new field, what must be insistently demanded? The absolute proof that there actually exist transmissible, contagious, infectious diseases of which the cause lies essentially and solely in the presence of microscopic organisms."^1e

" . . . [A] member of the Section of Medicine and Surgery, M. Sedillot, after long meditation on the lessons of a brilliant career, did not hesitate to assert that the successes as well as the failures of Surgery find a rational explanation in the principles upon which the germ theory is based, and that this theory, would found a new Surgery – already begun by a celebrated English surgeon, Dr. Lister, who was among the first to understand its fertility."^1f

* Italics in the original.

¹ Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and Joseph Lister (1827-1912). Germ Theory and its Applications to Medicine & On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996. [The Physiological Theory of Fermentation (Translated by F. Faulkner and D. C. Robb); The Germ Theory and Its Application to Medicine and Surgery (Revised) (Translated by H. C. Ernst); On the Extension of the Germ Theory to the Etiology of Certain Common Diseases (Revised) (Translated by H. C. Ernst).]
^a Author's Preface, at 15.
^b The Physiological Theory of Fermentation, at 48.
^c The Germ Theory and Its Application to Medicine and Surgery (Revised), at 110.
^d Ibid., at 112.
^e Ibid., at 114.
^f Ibid., at 116-117.

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