Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/828

746 make frequent tests to ascertain how well these filter beds are accomplishing their purpose. In France the Pasteur-Chamberland filter is largely used, and recent reports indicate that it has been instrumental in effecting a great reduction in the rate of mortality from typhoid fever, especially among the French soldiers in certain parts of the country where this disease a few years since caused a considerable mortality, and where the civil population, not using the filters, still furnishes many victims to this disease.

The exact knowledge which we now possess with reference to the micro-organisms which are the cause of erysipelas, puerperal fever, septicæmia, wound infection, etc., has also led to the employment of intelligent measures of prophylaxis. The brilliant success which has attended the carrying out of these modern antiseptic and aseptic methods in surgical and obstetrical practice are too well known to call for extended remark. But some statistics relating to this branch of our subject may serve to impress the matter upon the minds of those who have not fully appreciated the saving of life which has resulted from the employment of methods based upon a knowledge of the usual modes of wound infection and the micro-organisms to which such infection is due. Lister, the distinguished pioneer in the employment of antiseptics in surgical practice, reports that during the years 1864, 1865, and 1866, before he resorted to the use of antiseptics, the mortality in his surgical cases exceeded forty-five per cent, largely from septic complications. During the period from 1871 to 1876, in a total of 453 surgical cases treated by him with strict antiseptic precautions, the mortality from such complications was only 0·36 per cent.

The German surgeon Volkmann reports that prior to the introduction of antiseptic methods the mortality from compound fractures in his practice was forty per cent. After adopting Lister's methods he had 135 successive cases of compound fracture without a death from septic causes; two deaths only occurred out of the whole number of cases; one of these was the result of delirium tremens and the other of fatty embolism of the lungs.

Brignot, a French surgeon, reports that in French hospitals the mortality from major surgical operations before the introduction of antiseptic methods was 52·5 per cent, and that since it has been reduced to a little less than eleven per cent. In a series of 736 cases of compound fracture collected by Prof. William White, of Philadelphia, all of which occurred before the introduction of antiseptic methods, the mortality was forty per cent. In a second series of similar cases in which these methods were employed the mortality was only four per cent. Dennis, of New York, has reported a series of 516 cases of compound fracture without a single death from septic causes.