“Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits
préparés” (“Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the
prepared mind”), Pasteur famously proclaimed to his students at Lille the
year before his famous observations about yeast, bacteria, and
fermentation. In the late 1850s Pasteur published articles about his
experiments on fermentation, and as a chemist, the papers were in
scientific (not medical) journals. No wonder it was Lister’s chemist
colleague who alerted Lister to Pasteur’s work.
Lister pored over Pasteur’s investigations on spoiled beverages and
butter, and set his father’s microscopes to work in his kitchen laboratory,
repeating the experiments and finding the same microbes in what Pasteur
called the “world of the infinitely small.”^24 Lister was not the first
medical man to recognize Pasteur’s sibylline analysis; Thomas Spencer
Wells, a future president of the Royal College of Surgeons, proposed that
microorganisms in the air caused disease^25 but did not consider practical
interventions to combat them. Lister “perceived that Pasteur’s work could
be applied to surgery, but he took one more giant step: he began the
formulation of methods for doing so.”^26
At the International Medical Congress of 1876, held in Philadelphia,
Lister persuasively recollected, “When I read Pasteur’s original paper, I
said to myself, just as we destroy lice in the head of a child, who has
pediculi, by poisonous applications which will not injure the scalp, so, I
believe, we can use poisons on the wounds to destroy bacteria without
injuring the soft tissues of the patient.”^27 Lister brainstormed about a
chemical agent that could be sprayed into the air (still focusing on the
mistaken belief that germs were primarily floating in the air and
descending upon surgical sites), and all that was required was Lister
holding his nose to the Glasgow air. In maritime regions, ships’ timbers
were protected with creosote—a coal-tar derivative also used to coat
railroad ties. Further distillation of coal-tar yielded phenol, an aromatic
organic compound that was used to reduce odors of decomposition in
sewage, with the serendipitous finding that it mitigated cholera epidemics
(well before the bacteriology of cholera was understood). Dumped into
rivers, including the Thames during the “Great Stink” of 1858, phenol, or
carbolic acid, greatly diminished putrid smells around London. The
aromatic, semi-fruity odor belied the truth of its chemical, bactericidal
actions upon the bacteria teeming in the foul waters.