Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/130

114 1 14 A Short History of Nursing wonderful results to the patients, but who met only professional prejudice. Villemin, a French physi- cian who proved experimentally that tuberculosis was infectious, was also little noticed. He did not, it is true, isolate the bacillus, which might have been conclusive. This was to be the later work of Robert Koch, the German medical scientist. Surgery was even in a worse state than it had been in the later Middle Ages, and had a higher death rate, for the followers of Pare had used flame, boiling water, and alcohol in their technique, but the early Victorian age was an age of poulticing. It was believed that pus was essential to the repair of tissues, and the most virulent forms of sepsis were of common occurrence. This was the more unfortunate, since the discovery of ether by Mor- ton (1846 in Boston), and of chloroform by Bell (in London) and Thompson (1847, Edinburgh), gave promise of new fields for successful surgery. But the latter half of the century, as we shall see, brought the light that dispelled this darkness. The nineteenth century as a whole was remark- Intellectual able for its display of intellectual daring of wealth. Every direction of human life the nineteenth was affected by the revival of spiritual century force as manifested in philanthropy, science, art, literature, and social life. The early