Joseph Lister and Infection from the Air

Abstract

In his book, Floating Matter of the Air, John Tyndall (Tyndall, p. 262) quotes from Robert Boyle's ‘Essay on the Pathological Part of Physik’ ‘that he who thoroughly understands the nature of ferments and fermentations shall probably … give a fair account of divers phenomena of several diseases, which will perhaps be never properly understood without an insight into the doctrine of fermentations'. It was more than a century and a half before the first part of this suggestion was fulfilled, after which the unravelling of the causes of infective diseases proceeded rapidly. In 1836 de la Tour and, almost simultaneously, Schwann (Tyndall, p. 7) discovered, in yeast, the agent of fermentation as a living organism which reproduced itself in endless succession. Schwann also observed that putrefaction in meat broth did not set in if this was kept in contact, not with ordinary air, but with air which had been previously brought to a high temperature.