Scientific Theory Choice and Social Structure: The Case of Joseph Lister's Antisepsis,Humoral Theory and Asepsis

Sutton J. Bland , “The conquest of sepsis”, Lancet, i (1927), 781; Godlee R. J. , Lord Lister (Oxford, 1924); Leeson J. R. , Lister as I knew him (London, 1927); Lucas-Champonniere J. , “An essay on scientific surgery”, British medical journal, ii (1902), 1819–22; Thompson St C. , “Memories of a house surgeon”, Lancet, i (1927), 775–80; Truax R. , Joseph Lister (Indianapolis, 1944); Cheyne W. Watson , Lister and his achievement (London, 1925); Wrench G. T. , Lord Lister, his life and work (London, 1913).

Fisher R. , Lord Lister (London, 1977); Stern B. J. , Society and medical progress (London, 1941); Youngson A. J. , The scientific revolution in Victorian medicine (London, 1979).

For example see Youngson , op. cit. (ref. 2), 190–5.

This is in part an unfortunate consequence of the early writing of the history of surgical sterility, principally by Lister's own juniors, which accorded all honours to Lister for the innovation, and downgraded asepsis to the stature of a mere refinement of antisepsis. It is only when asepsis is recognized as distinctive, that the discontinuity becomes obvious.

For accounts of this theoretical approach see Derrida J. , Positions (London, 1981); Macherey P. and Balibar E. , “Literature as an ideological form”, Oxford literary review, iii (1978), 4–12; Levi-Strauss C. , Structural anthropology (Harmondsworth, 1963); Silverman D. , Sociology and qualitative methodology (Aldershot, 1981). For examples see Bulmer R. , “Why the cassowary is not a bird”, Man, ii (1967), 5–25; Tambiah S. , “Animals are good to think and good to prohibit”, Ethnology, viii (1969), 423–59.

Bloor D. , Knowledge and social imagery (London, 1976); Bloor D. , “Durkheim and Mauss revisited: Classification and the sociology of knowledge”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xiii (1982), 267–97; Hesse M. , The structure of scientific inference (London, 1974).

See Bloor , op. cit. (ref. 6, 1982).

For example see Fisher , op. cit. (ref. 2); Smith F. B. , The people's health 1830–1910 (London, 1979).

Lister J. , “On a new method of treating compound fractures, abscesses etc.”, Lancet, i (1867), 326–9, 357–9, 387–9, 507–9; ii (1867), 95–96.

Lister J. , “On the antiseptic principle in the practice of surgery”, Lancet, ii (1867), 353–6; “Illustrations of the antiseptic system of treatment in surgery”, Lancet, ii (1867), 668–9.

Farley J. and Geison G. , “Science, politics and spontaneous generation in nineteenth century France: The Pasteur-Pouchet debate”, Bulletin of the history of medicine, iv (1974), 161–98.

For example Bennett J. Hughes , “The atmospheric germ theory”, Edinburgh medical journal, xiii (1968), 810–34.

Stern , op. cit. (ref. 2).

Thompson J. (ed.), The works of William Cullen (Edinburgh, 1827), i, 541.

Nutton V. , “The seeds of disease”, Medical history, xxvii (1983), 1–35, p. 4.

Rosenberg C. E. , Healing and history (New York, 1979), 117.

Hudson A. , Lectures on the study of fever (Philadelphia, 1869), 49; quoted in Parsons G. B. , “The British medical profession and contagion”, Medical history, xxii (1978), 138–50, p. 141.

Paget J. , “Address in surgery”, in Year book for medicine, surgery and their allied sciences (London, 1862), 178–9.

“Editorial”, Lancet, ii (1879), 246–7, p. 247.

Lister J. , “Effects of the antiseptic treatment upon the salubrity of a surgical hospital”, Lancet, i (1870), 4–6, 40–42.

Lister J. , “On a case illustrating the present aspects of the antiseptic system of treatment in surgery”, British medical journal, i (1871), 30–32, p. 32.

Barnes R. , “Letter to the editor”, Lancet, i (1874), 179.

Lister J. , “Address on the present position of antiseptic surgery”, British medical journal, ii (1890), 377–9, p. 379.

Smith , op. cit. (ref. 8), 218.

Richardson B. W. , Hygeia: A city of health (London, 1875), quoted in Stevenson L. G. , “Science down the drain”, Bulletin of the history of medicine, xxix (1955), 1–26, p. 6.

Richardson B. W. , Vita medica (London, 1896), quoted in Stevenson, op. cit. (ref. 25), 9.

Richardson B. W. , Biological experimentation (London, 1897), quoted in Stevenson, op. cit. (ref. 25), 9.

Turner B. , The body and society (Oxford, 1984), 215.

Leeson , op. cit. (ref. 2), 107.

Lister J. , “Address on the effects of the antiseptic treatment upon the general salubrity of surgical hospitals”, British medical journal, ii (1875), 769–71, p. 771.

ibid., 771.

ibid., 770.

Medical Research Council, “Report: Aseptic methods in the operating suite”, Lancet, i (1968), 705–9, 763–8, 831–9.

Bennett Hughes , op. cit. (ref. 12), 832.

Nunneley T. , “Address in surgery”, Lancet, ii (1869), 143–56, pp. 152, 154.

Lister J. , “An address on the treatment of fracture of the patella”, British medical journal, ii (1883), 855–60, p. 859.

Quoted in Stern, op. cit. (ref. 2), 195.

See Fisher , op. cit. (ref. 2), 252.

“Report”, British medical journal, i (1883), 815–16.

Smith , op. cit. (ref. 8), 271–5.

Lancet Sanitary Commission, “Surgical wards of St Barts Hospital report”, Lancet, i (1874), 246–7, p. 247.

Agnew D. H. , Principles and practice of surgery (Philadelphia, 1881), ii, 271–2.

MacCormack W. , Antiseptic surgery (London, 1880), 86.

See Godlee , op. cit. (ref. 1), 198–202; Fisher , op. cit. (ref. 2).

For example Stern , op. cit. (ref. 2).

Stern , op. cit. (ref. 2); Fisher , op. cit. (ref. 2).

Selwyn S. , “Sir James Simpson and hospital cross infection”, Medical history, ix (1965), 241–8.

Toledo-Pereyra L. H. and Toledo M. M. , “Anti-contagionism in the opposition to Lister”, Current surgery, xxxvi (1979), 78–87.

Simpson J. , Collected works (Edinburgh, 1871), ii, 289–92.

Smith , op. cit. (ref. 8), 274.

Youngson , op. cit. (ref. 2), 220.

Smith , op. cit. (ref. 8), 276.

ibid., 276.

Selwyn , op. cit. (ref. 47). This argument is also briefly developed by Toledo-Pereyra and Toledo , op. cit. (ref. 48), 80.

Hamilton D. and Lamb M. , “Surgeons and surgery”, in Checkland O. and Lamb M. , Health care as social history (Aberdeen, 1982). See also Hamilton D. , “The nineteenth century surgical revolution – antisepsis or better nutrition?”, Bulletin of the history of medicine, lvi (1982), 30–40.

Hamilton and Lamb , op. cit. (ref. 55), 85.

For example see Wohl A. S. , Endangered lives (London, 1983).

Barnes , op. cit. (ref. 22). Leeson, Lister's dresser in the 1870s, recalls that Lister “never tired of insisting that the surroundings of the operation were of less importance than the proper performance of the operation itself; that asepsis was Utopian, and Man being a fallible creature that he is, it is not in the patient's interest to risk a perfection which belongs to the ideal”: Leeson, op. cit. (ref. 1), 105.

See Youngson , op. cit. (ref. 2), 190–5.

Douglas M. , Purity and danger (London, 1984), 35.

Lister J. , “An address on the treatment of wounds”, Lancet, ii (1881), 863–6, 901–3, p. 902.

Manier E. , “History, philosophy and the sociology of biology”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xi (1980), 1–24, p. 21. Manier's theory of innovation is important to the present analysis. He argues that “in situations where science comes into conflict with some aspect of the dominant culture, innovators may have to change the established cultural understanding of the nature of science … one of the possible responses is to attempt to establish a new consensus out of hitherto unrelated aspects of the socio-cultural products which have accumulated historically and which are available to the innovator's reformation and reorganization” (p. 21). It is suggested that it was just such a reformulation that led to asepsis.

Wohl , op. cit. (ref. 57), 140.

Creighton C. , History of epidemics in Britain (Cambridge, 1894), ii, 433.

Bowman A. K. , Sir William MacEwen (London, 1942), 61.

Mitchell J. M. , “The surgeon's glove”, Annals of surgery, cxxii (1945), 902.

MacCormack , op. cit. (ref. 43), 165.

Schimmelbusch C. , Aseptic treatment of wounds (London, 1895).

Gerster A. G. , Aseptic and antiseptic surgery (London, 1888), 19.

“A visit to the clinic of Professor Garre at Bonn”, British journal of surgery, i (1914), 695–8; “Sir John Bland-Sutton at the Middlesex Hospital”, British journal of surgery, ii (1915), 110–13.

Bidwell L. A. , Minor surgery (London, 1912), 14.

Mitchell , op. cit. (ref. 66), 902.

Ayton M. , Report of an infection control nurses association working party on ward protective clothing (London, 1984), paragraphs B2, B6.

Fisher , op. cit. (ref. 2), 275.

Gerster , op. cit. (ref. 69), 19.

Lockwood C. B. , Aseptic surgery (Edinburgh, 1896), 162.

Beck C. , Manual of surgical asepsis (New York, 1895), facing p. 241.

See ref. 70 (1915), 111.

“Professor Von Eiselberg's clinic at Vienna”, British journal of surgery, ii (1915), 328–33, p. 329.

“Sir Victor Horsley's clinic”, British journal of surgery, i (1914), 515–17, p. 515.

Schimmelbusch , op. cit. (ref. 68), 11.

Casteneda A. , “Historical development of the surgical mask”, Surgery, xlix (1961), 423–8.

Fletcher V. S. , “A history of the operation gown and mask”, NATNews, xiv (1977), 19–24.

Also see Bidwell , op. cit. (ref. 71), 282.

See ref. 70 (1914), 696.

See ref. 70 (1915), 110.

“The clinic of Sir Watson Cheyne”, British journal of surgery, ii (1915), 325–7, p. 325.

Fletcher , op. cit. (ref. 83), 20. A recent assessment of aseptic practices is contained in Medical Research Council, op. cit. (ref. 33).

Ritter M. A. , “The operating room environment as affected by people and the surgical face mask”, Clinical orthopaedics, cxi (1975), 147–50.

Collins B. J. and Bibby B. A. , “Calculating infection risk”, in Cheesborough D. J. (ed.), Infection Control Nurses Association 12th annual Symposium (London, 1981), 17–20.

Mitchell N. J. , “Theatre clothing as a means of reducing numbers of airborne organisms”, in Cheesborough, op. cit. (ref. 89), 9–10; Ayton , op. cit. (ref. 73), paragraph C3; Orr N. , “Is a mask necessary in the operating theatre?”, Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons, lxiii (1981), 390–1.

Bowman , op. cit. (ref. 65), 61–62.

Thompson , op. cit. (ref. 1), 779.

Stern , op. cit. (ref. 2), 199.

Cameron H. C. , Evolution of wound treatment (Edinburgh, 1907), 62.

Lister J. , “On some points in the history of antiseptic surgery”, Lancet, i (1908), 1815–16.

Beck , op. cit. (ref. 77), 61.

Lockwood , op. cit. (ref. 76), 166.

Sutton Bland , op. cit. (ref. 1), 781.

Beck , op. cit. (ref. 77), 61.

Vallack A. S. , Principles and practice of asepsis (London, 1905), 4.

ibid., 6.

Cameron , op. cit. (ref. 94), 50.

This idea, of surgery, and possibly all forms of healing, imposing on a patient a status passage from ‘Victim’ to ‘Survivor’, is developed in Fox N. J. , “The ethnography of surgery”, paper presented at the British Sociological Association Medical Sociology Conference, September 1987, and in a forthcoming thesis.

Wohl , op. cit. (ref. 57), 3.

Bowman , op. cit. (ref. 65), 33–34.

Wohl , op. cit. (ref. 57), 72.

Cartwright F. F. , “Lister the man”, British journal of surgery, liv (1967), 405–10, p. 409.

Buchdahl G. , “Editorial response to David Bloor”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xiii (1982), 299–304.