USA > Maine > Maine; a history, Volume IV > Part 29
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The world is indebted to Joseph Jackson Lister (2), Lord Lister's father, who, as an amateur optician, com- bined mathematical knowledge with mechanical in- genuity so that he was able to devise formulas for the combination of lenses of crown glass with others of flint glass so adjusted that the refractive errors of one were corrected, or compensated by the other, thus pro- ducing lenses capable of showing an image highly magnified yet relatively free from spherical and chro- matie aberrations which had so long baffled the pro- foundest physicists of that age.
(I) An electron is approximately 6.800.000,000.000.000 times smaller than the smallest object that can be seen by the most powerful microscope made. After listening to an illuminating address by the late lamented Pro- fessor Robinson on this subject, I submitted a definition to him which he thought gave an approximate idea of this elucive body, namely: Electrons are so small that the distance between them relative to their size is as great as the distance between the fixed stars relative to their size, remembering that light from the nearest one traveling at the rate of 186,000 miles a second takes over four years to reach the earth.
See next page for reference No. 2.
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BIOGRAPHICAL
With the perfection of the compound microscope the development of histology to the rank of an independent science was secured, and the development of the cell theory took its place at the pinnacle of the great central generalization in physiology of the nineteenth century. It demonstrated that the cell is in reality the essential structure of the living organism, that every function of the organism is really an expression of a chemical change aud in itself a minute chemical laboratory.
It was this combined point of view of the pathologist and chemist, this union of hitherto dissociated forces, which made it possible to discard the old idea of digestion and respiration, and accept in a general way the view that the digestive apparatus and lungs act as channels of fuel supply, blood and lymph channels as the transportation system, and muscles and tissue cells as the consumption furnace where the fuel supply is burned and energy acquired for the purpose of the organism, supplemented by a set of excretory organs through which the waste products are eliminated from the system.
As the peasantry of England before Jenner had known of the curative value of cow-pox over small-pox, so the peasants of that now much distracted country- Poland-knew that the annoying skin disease, known as itch, from which they suffered, was caused by an insect which they had learned to dislodge with the point of a needle, and thereby cure themselves of this distressing malady. This fact was conveyed by a medi- cal student from Poland to Paris near the close of the fourth decade at which time the itch, instead of being a most plebeian malady, was considered a court disease under the name of "gale repercutee." Indeed, the imagi- native Dr. Hahnemann did not hesitate to assert as a positive maxim that three-fourths of all the ills that flesh is heir to were in reality nothing but various forms of "gale repercutee." or in English, "the itch struck in." What makes the discovery of the cause of itch of so much importance and worthy of being referred to here, is that it dropped a brand new idea Into the medical profession of Paris, and hence into the world,- an idea destined, in the long run, to prove itself a veritable bomb, namely, that a minute and quite un- suspected animal parasite may he the cause of a widely prevalent and highly important human disease.
Coincident with the discovery of the cause of itch came another discovery of greater importance hy an English medical student, James Paget, who became one of the most famous men of England. It was while he was dissecting the muscular tissue of a human sub- ject that he found little specks of extraneous matter which, when examined under the microscope, were determined to be the cocoon of a minute insect, which was named Trichina Spiralis. Here the matter rested for more than ten years, when, in 1847, our greatest American anatomist, Joseph Leidy, discovered the cysts of trichina in the tissues of pork. It was, however, another ten years before it was demonstrated that this parasite gets into the human system through the inges- tion of infected pork and that it causes a definite set of symptoms of disease which had been designated as those of rheumatism, gout, typhoid fever, and other affections. The medical profession was aroused as
(2) In the life of Lister, the senior, we leara that he was near-sighted, that as a child he was accustomed to glue his eye to an air-bubble that had been imprisoned in window glass which acted as a concave lens and enabled him to see the country more distinctly. Only a genius would be able to make such a discovery. As he grew up to manhood he devoted all his spare time to the study of optics and thus he was able to over- come the obstacles which had baffled the profoundest physicists for nearly two hundred and fifty years, for which work he was elected a fellow of the Royal So- ciety, he being the first man known to establish a firm reputation upon an air bubble.
uever betore over ILf- - Alijevt. the appesal public be- came alarmed, and American pork was excluded from sume foreign markets. important as the discovery of the trichina parasite became itself, its greatest im- portance to mankind was the part it played in direct- ing attention to the subject of microscopie parasites as the cause of disease in general, because in conse- quence of this discovery the next succeeding years were a time of great activity in the study of micro- seopic organisms and microscopic tissues.
One of the crowning achievements of this period was the discovery that the very common and most distress- ing disease of the scalp, known as favus, was due to the presence and growth on the scalp of a vegetable organ- ism. By these discoveries it was fully demonstrated to the medical profession that not only animal but also vegetable organisms directly caused diseases with which mankind is afflicted. This, it is needless to say, was a step forward in the progress of medicine of tremendous and far-reaching importance.
In the fifth decade of the last century there came a discovery wholly American of transcendent importance, when W. T. G. Morton administered sulphuric ether to a patient upon whom Dr. J. C. Warren performed a severe operation, causing the patient to sleep through the whole of it, and when the operation was over to awake to consciousness without realizing any pain whatever. As the greatest surgeons of the world were of one opinion and had so expressed themselves that such a thing would never be accomplished, the mirac- ulous, the impossible, had been accomplished. This discovery was not only of the greatest importance to the patient and surgeon directly, but it was destined to be of the greatest importance to them from experi- mental studies carried out, ia the most humane man- uer, on the lower animals.
Some of the earlier workers with the microscope held that the minute specks which make up the substance of yeast are living vegetable organisms aud the growth of these organisms is the cause of fermentation. They also held tentatively the opinion that similar organ- isms to be found in all putrefying matter, animal or vegetable, were the cause of putrefaction. The great German authorities, Liehig and Helmholtz, stood out firmly against this view, claiming that the presence of micro-organisms in fermenting and putrefying sub- stances was merely incidental.
The studies and experiments that Pasteur entered upon in the sixth decade were aimed at a solution of a controversy that had been raging for more than a quarter of a century. He proved that the minute specks which so largely make up the substance of yeast do all that his most imaginative predecessors had sus- pected, that without them there would be no fermenta- tion (3). He showed that it was the microscopic yeast plant which, seizing an atom of the molecule, liberates the remaining atom in the form of carbonic acid and alcohol, thus constituting the process of fermentation; that another microscopic plant, designated by Devaine, a confrére of his, a bacterium, acted in a similar way to cause the destruction of organic molecules, thus pro- ducing the process called putrefaction.
(3) It has been shown that fermentation may be effected apart from life and has the extraordinary importance in this sense that it promises to elucidate the nature of life itself which may depend upon the sequence of this fermentation. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the fermentation of sugar is the living yeast plant and fermentation in this sense is a vital phenomenon as distinguished from a chemical one. In 1897 Buckner extracted from yeast the very substance of its ferment, the zymaze, separable from the yeast- cells, yet formed within them, as ptyalin is formed within the cells of the salivary glands. The action of zymaze may be stated in terms of molecular physics. the formation of zymaze may be stated in terms of plant physiology.
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HISTORY OF MAINE
Pasteur very early in his career distinguished hin- self in chemistry in studying tartaric acid and a rarer form of this acid named paratartaric, or racemie acid, the former rotating polarized light to the right, while the latter rotated it neither to the right nor to the left. It was known that a crystalline substance may be disymmetric, that is, may have two forms of crystals, one right-handed and the other left-handed. Ordinary tartaric acid is right-handed, that is, it rotates polarized light to the right; while paratartaric, or racemic acid is neither right-handed nor left-handed; that is, it does not rotate polarized light to the right nor to the left (+).
Pasteur had for his problem the solving of the mean- ing of this phenomenon. By careful study with the microscope he found on those crystals which turn polarized light to the right, a minute facet, not hitherto described, which led him to think that these crystals were disymmetric, or one of a pair, which caused him to search for n left-handed crystal, which no one had ever seen. He rightly surmised that it was locked up in those crystals which had no minute facet upon them and which turned polarized light neither to the right nor to the left. After many trials he finally prepared a solution of this acid and let it crystallize, in which eryatals he found the two forms, each having a minute facet making a pair. When he separated these crystals and made a solution of them, one solution turned polarized light to the right while the other turned it to the left. He had thus discovered another secret of nature and had solved the phenomenon of the problem set before him and made one of the greatest discoveries of the age. Under certain conditions one of the two acids may be destroyed by the growth of a bacillus which does not touch the other one, so that polarized light passed through it will be diverted to the right or left, according to which one of the two acids has been destroyed. This remarkable discovery of Pasteur shows that the molecule of the acid exists in two forms, and this fact enables us to found chemistry in space, or stero-chemistry, or solid chemistry, which considers the molecule in three dimensions and is achieving re- sults beyond the wildest dreams of man in synthetic compounds such as Ehrlich's invaluable compound of arsenic, called salvarsan. or 606. in studying this sub- ject we are better able to appreciate, not only the nature but the possibilities of stero-chemistry as pro- mulgated by Pasteur, to whom as a genius in making this discovery, we must accord the honor of having discovered the method of making discoveries.
In applying the principles of this discovery to help a grocer ont of trouble, he found that a blue mold feeds upon the acid of the left hand, leaving the right hand behind, thus causing polarized light to rotate to the right. This gave him the key to the true nature of ferments. As the scope of his work widened he became at different times a doctor of wines, vines, silk-worm disease, chicken cholera, swine, sheep, cattle, and finally, of human beings.
It was his work on chicken cholera that led him to the greatest of all his discoveries and finally answered the challenge made by the discovery of Jenner in the last years of the eighteenth century. He had advanced from making cultures of all known germs in a test tube to the attenuation of cultures and to the supreme dis- covery that an attenuated culture is able to confer im- munity against another culture at full strength.
Pasteur found in keeping the cultures of germs of chicken cholera that they lost strength and by this means be could prepare and stock a graduate series of cultures in every degree of strength from full virulence to non-virulence. With these attenuated cultures he
could produce in a chicken a mild attack of cholera, which would render the chicken immune against an attack of the full virulent culture. This discovery was an explanation how cow-pox protected man against small-pox, and indicated that the method could be extended to other diseases of a similar nature.
This inference was soon to be verified, for in Febru- ary of that memorable year of 1SS1. Pasteur again announced to the French Academy of Science that he had produced an attenuated virus of the germs of anthrax by which he could protect sheep and cattle against that disease. As this announcement meant the saving of millions of dollars to France, a president of au agricultural society immediately challenged it by proposing to furnish Pasteur fifty sheep for the test. The challenge was immediately accepted by Pasteur, who substituted two goats for two of the sheep and allowed ten cattle to be added. He divided the sixty animals into two lots of thirty each, and on the 5th and 17th of May he vaccinated one lot with an atten- uated virus of anthrax as a protection against anthrax, and on the 31st he vaccinated both lots of thirty each with an extremely virulent culture of anthrax which had been in his laboratory for years. On the 2nd of June a vast crowd had assembled to witness the closing scenes of this test which had become world wide in interest. What they witnessed there on that farm in France was dramatic in the highest degree! All the animals not protected by the attenuated virus of an- thrax were dead, while those which were protected on the 5th and 17th of May were moving about the farm as if nothing had happened to them. This was a scene that amazed the assembly, and it was heralded ' far and wide over the world that a new era had dawned in medicine.
This was not the only benefit to come from Pasteur's work on anthrax, for two years previous to this time he had proved by the mere examination of a drop of blood that a woman supposed to have died from puer- peral fever had actually died of anthrax, and Sclavo, a worker with Pasteur, had developed a serum treat- ment for anthrax in man, so that not only animals but man had also been relieved of the scourge of this disease.
I was in Europe at that time, but missed witnessing this test on account of the sickness and death of one of our party, the lamented Dr. N. A. Hersom of this city. I did, however, have the pleasure of meeting Pasteur at the Seventh International Medical Congress, held in Loudon in August, and witnessed one of the greatest ovations ever given to man. It was at the opening meeting of more than three thousand men from all parts of the civilized world, when the student of tri- china fame, Sir James Paget, the president, in the course of his eloquent address referred iu appropriate terms to the great work of Pasteur, to whom he had turned to his right to face, At the conclusion of this reference by the president the assembly rose. en masse, and gave cheer after cheer, with the greatest enthusi- asm, for many minutes; all the time the modest Pas- teur stood smiling and bowing in acknowledgment.
Pasteur, at this time, was already far along in his experimental studies of rabies, in which one complex- ity after another had to be unraveled. The microscope or the ultra-microscope had failed to reveal the living organism which causes it. Therefore, he finally adopted the theory that rabies must be studied, not in the saliva or blood, but in the brain and spinal cord. In this way he was able to obtain the cause of the disease and standardize it and its use upon animals in a simi- lar manner to the method employed in chicken cholera and anthrax.
The revelations involved in this and similar re- searches has thrown much light upon the influences brought to hear upon the microbe, so that their viru- lence can be enhanced or attenuated by passage through bodies of highly susceptible or highly refractory host, from which have preceded the researches to which we
(4) We cau perhaps better understand the formation of this acid by assuming that it is similar to one prism with its apex placed to the base of another of the same strength which would enable a ray of light to emerge on the same plane to which it entered.
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BIOGRAPHICAL
owe the antitoxin of diphtheria, the inoculation against plague and typhoid fever, the serum treatment of tetanus, and cerebro-spinal meningitis, and the various microbic preparations now found to be of value in surgery.
After having treated successfully chicken cholera and anthrax, and having treated hundreds of animals successfully against the infection of rabies by a protective virus as obtained from the spinal cord of an animal which had died of rabies, the time had come to apply it to a human being, when an Alsatian boy, who had been badly bitten by a mad dog, came with his mother on July 6, 1885. The boy was suc- cessfully treated and became an employe at the Pas- teur Institute (5). Then in October came a young shepherd who, in protecting others, got badly bitten by a mad dog. lle, too, was cured and became an employe at the Institute. The cure of these two cases caused people, who had been bitten by mad dogs, or other animals, to rush to Paris from every part of the civilized world and thousands were rescued from the terrible death of hydrophobia.
It is a singular coincidence of lite that it was Lord Lister's father who, as an amateur optician perfected the compound microscope which was absolutely neces- sary for Pasteur to make all his discoveries; while on the other hand the epoch-making discoveries of Pasteur were equally indispensable for Lister to develop anti- septic surgery.
It was Lister's father's skill with the microscope that engaged his attention early in life and made him so skilful in its use. Thus we see the great importance of the microscope and the indispensable part it played in the career of both of these men, and likewise the indispensable part it played in the revolution that took place in the practice of medicine in the nineteenth century.
It is impossible for anyone who did not live through these times to realize the condition which existed be- fore this revolution in the practice of medicine took place, or to know that tremendous opposition to anti- septic surgery for more than a dozen years which had to be met and overcome by Pasteur and Lister. They were attacked by the foremost men, not only in medicine, but in the church; but they had found the truth and based their action upon it, and this gave them the power to overcome all opposition (6).
Lister's studies with the microscope with his father and Sharpey, and his long service with the ablest men in London and Edinburgh, had prepared him for the
(5) In 1888 many nations joined with France in showing their appreciation of the great services of Louis Pasteur, by presenting him the Pasteur Institute which typifies his career by having on its walls of rare mar- ble the names of his great discoveries, interspersed with figures of dogs, fowl, sheep, and cattle, and inter- twined with wreaths of vines and mulberry leaves. In the vaulted arch, beneath which he now rests, are four angels, representing Faith, Hope, Charity, and Science.
(6) In accomplishing this revolution, Florence Night- ingale performed a prodigious task when, as soon as the Crimean War broke out, she took a body of nurses to Scutari to take charge of the barracks hospital. IIer ministrations and reforms became known throughout the world by her "Notes on Hospitals" and by her "Notes on Nursing." She perceived from the first that hospitals should furnish a training for nurses just as much as a training for doctors, and her life stands for the accomplishment of the trained nurse who has contributed much towards revolutionizing the practice of medicine. Her work was so unique in its inception and so humane in its execution that it has received the greatest attention of historians and poets, among whom was our Longfellow who immortalized it and her in verse.
practice he was to encounter when he left Syme in Edinburgh and went to teach surgery in Glasgow. The wards of the Glasgow Infirmary, though recently built, were dirty and gloomy. The patients from the squalid alleys and factories had but little resistance to the encroachment of pyaemia, septicaemia, erysipelas, and gangrene, which were so rife in the Infirmary, and at times became alarmingly epidemic. This condi- tion was common to all hospitals in those days, no matter how well they were ventilated. Those scenes of repulsive horror and sights of agony, in which two out of every five that had an open wound died, de- feated the objects for which the Infirmary was founded, and stirred the tender nature of Lister profonudly. They were so familiar that they were met with that stoicism which men rightly assume toward that which is inevitable.
Lister had the faculty of making himself strange to the familiar. He was taught that putrefaction in wounds was due to the oxygen in the air, but he ques- tioned it by the sole right of his genius and judged it by the measure of his own insight and power, when he saw Pasteur's work in the light of a first principal through the understanding of the vitality of tissues as a means of relief to humanity and the betterment of the science and art of surgery.
Clinicians and students with the microscope had been forging a chain of evidence connecting diseases of this world with the germs of an invisible world, the final links of which Pasteur, by his masterful discoveries and experiments, had so far completed that it remained for Lister to weld them all together and use the chain of evidence effectively to revolutionize the practice of surgery. Lister seems to have been the only mau to have grasped the meaning of all this chain of evi- dence. Other men knew what had been done, and doubtless what Pasteur had done, but Lister had a genius for a father, who, possessing profound mathe- matical knowledge and great ingenuity in optics, was able not only to perfect the compound microscope, but to become an expert in its use and imbue his son with its great possibilities in his youth when his active mind was eager to grasp all that came within its range and make it his own. This undoubtedly was the secret of his success. He had been taught to use the micro- scope with that mathematical precision with which it is constructed at an age when such instructions be- came as fixed and as rigid in his mind as the pictures on a photographic plate. This acquisition became a standard for all his subsequent mental activities. He thus knew when examining a subject whether his vision was clear, and if he could not interpret the meaning of what he saw he was not content, and bent all his energies to find it out. It was this training of the mind with which he viewed the subject of simple and compound fractures of bones.
With an equal amount of injury, the one without the skin being broken went on to rapid recovery, while the other with the skin broken, there was apt to be pyaemia, septicaemia, gangrene, and death. What was the cause of this difference? If lie examined the dis- charge under the microscope he found organisms of the invisible world. He was told that these were inci- dental to the inflammation which was caused by the oxygen of the air. He questioned it. llis mind had been so trained that when he could not find an ex- planation for what took place, he considered it a mys- tery, but he did not accept the mystery and allow it to become familiar with him. He was in advance 04 the weight of authority in acknowledging the mys- tery, as they were indifferent to these diseases as mys- teries. He searched the authorities for their philosophy as to the cause of these diseases, but he found none because they had none. His trained mind and philo- sophic temperament challenged these mysteries. He was discontented in making his reports to have to record deaths so often from these diseases, and so he inaugurated the most scrupulous cleanliness, because
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