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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
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