Florence Nightingale developed an interest in the social questions of the day and made visits to the homes of the sick in the local villages and began to investigate hospitals and nursing. Her parents did not approve of her wanting to become a nurse, but never the less, she undertook the months training in 1851, which enabled her to take a vacancy as Superintendent of the Establishment for Gentlewomen during illness.
In March 1854 Brittan, France and Turkey declared war on Russia. It was in these years that Florence Nightingale was made famous for her work in the Crimean Wars. Florence was appointed by Sidney Herbert to oversee the introduction of female nurses into military hospitals in Turkey. On the 4th of November 1854, she arrived at the Barrack hospital in Scutari with a party of 38 nurses. The nurses were at first ignored by the other doctors but as the fresh casualties arrived from the battle of Inkermann, the nurses were fully stretched. Her work to care for the wounded soldiers was highlighted in ‘The Times’ newspaper, and caused many rich people to donate to help the situation. It was with this money that Florence set up the Nightingale Training School for nurses at St Thomas’s Hospital.
Florence nightingales work in the Crimean wars helped to reduce the death rate from 42% to 2% by making the living conditions cleaner. She also made nursing into a respectable profession, this was a great achievement. However, Florence did not believe in Lister’s theories and mocked them with the other doctors.
Louis Pasteur was a French microbiologist and chemist. He is known for his work on the germ theory of disease and his devilment techniques of inoculation and for the first vaccine against rabies. Pasteur investigated the reason that wine and beer could go sour. Under the microscope he found two different shapes of yeast in the good and sour alcohol.
Pasteur showed the yeast to be an organism which did not require oxygen for fermentation to occur. Pasteur demonstrated that mild heating applied after fermentation would kill the microorganisms and prevent souring. This gentle heating has come to be known as pasteurization. With a specially-constructed bent flask, Pasteur demonstrated conclusively that decay was produced by air-borne microorganisms. This refuted the doctrine of spontaneous generation. He also discovered the parasite responsible for killing silkworms, and saved the French silk industry by recommending that all infected worms and mulberries by destroyed.
While Pasteur did not develop germ theory (Girolamo Fracastoro, Friedrich Henle and others had suggested it earlier), he conducted experiments that clearly indicated its correctness and managed to convince most of Europe that it was true.
The significance of Louis Pasteur’s work on Lister was that he’d been looking for the cause of septic infection; he knew something was making the blood cells die and believed it was poison in the air. He was directed by Professor Anderson to read a bout Louis Pasteur and it was then that he was able to accept it was germs or microbes in the are that caused septic infection and as a result realized he had to shield the wound from the air. Lister recognised the relationship between Pasteur’s research and his own. He considered that microbes in the air were causing the putrefaction that had to be destroyed before they entered the wound. In the previous year Lister had heard that 'carbolic acid' was being used to treat sewage in Carlisle, and that fields treated with it were freed of a parasite causing disease in cattle.
Lister then began to clean wounds and dress them using a solution of carbolic acid.
He was able to announce at a British Medical Association meeting in 1867, that his wards at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary had remained clear of sepsis for nine months.
Although his methods initially met with indifference and hostility, doctors gradually began to support his antiseptic techniques. In 1870 Lister's antiseptic methods were used by Germany, during the Franco-Prussian war saving many Prussian soldiers’ lives. In Germany, by 1878, Robert Koch was demonstrating the usefulness of steam for sterilizing surgical instruments and dressings.
German surgeons were beginning to practice antiseptic surgery, which involved keeping wounds free from micro-organisms by the use of sterilized instruments and materials. However in Brittan it was not until much later that his theories and techniques were accepted.
