英语四级阅读200篇:Unit 48 passage1_大学英语阅读

英语四级阅读200篇:Unit 48 passage1

　　He found what he wanted in a powerful disinfectant, a by-product of coal-tar , which he learned that the authorities at Carlisle were using on their sewage. It was called carbolic. Lister introduced it into the hospital wards, into the operating room, into his surgical bandages. He dipped his instruments in it, and his swabs were rinsed in it. He even sprayed the air around with a fine mist of carbolic while he performed his operations. Joseph Lister had introduced antiseptic surgery.

　　It is fascinating that away in his maternity hospital in Vienna, Dr Semmelweis had reached the same conclusion. There, with greater violence even than in Britain, the thing flared into an unreasoned persecution of the pioneer by the old traditional men. Semmelweis published his idea of antiseptics; he was persecuted, reviled, laughed at, and dismissed from his post for advocating this new method. He was driven temporarily insane; but, recovering, continued his experiments in private. In one of them he contracted the blood-poisoning he was seeking to eliminate and died: a martyr to truth, a prophet of progress who gave his life in a great cause.

　　Over in France the chemist, Louis Pasteur, had just published his studies of the cause of fermentation in wines. He demonstrated that the dust of the air contained minute organisms which increased and multiplied themselves in a kind of fungus when they came into contact with the right conditions. He conducted the most careful experiments, and demonstrated that fermentation which took place in the dust-laden air of Paris did not do so in the pure glacial air on the high Alps.