Antisepsis

Antisepsis is the practice of destroying or inhibiting disease-causing microorganisms on living tissue and surgical equipment to prevent infection, distinct from the later practice of asepsis, which keeps a surgical environment free of microorganisms from the start rather than treating them once present. Joseph Lister introduced antiseptic surgical technique at Glasgow Royal Infirmary from 1865, using carbolic acid on instruments, wounds and the operating air after learning of Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease, and cut his ward's post-operative mortality sharply within a few years. Nearly two decades earlier, Ignaz Semmelweis, already recorded on this atlas, had reached a strikingly similar practical conclusion at Vienna General Hospital without any germ theory to explain it, ordering doctors to wash their hands in chlorinated lime between autopsies and childbirth deliveries, with equally dramatic results; his findings were largely rejected in his own lifetime, in part for lacking the explanation germ theory would only later supply.