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

　　When Lister read of these experiments he saw that in them, as had long suspected, lay the final clue to his own problem. It was not until years afterwards that he heard of Semmelweis, but already an opposition similar to that which broke the Hungarian was growing here. Simpson himself, who as the pioneer of anesthetics had suffered a similar persecution for his own innovations, led the attack; and soon the old brigade of the medical men were bringing all their weapons of ridicule and wild accusation to bear on the Spray and Gauze school, as they called Listers methods. One of the ugliest fights of Listers career was with the Glasgow Infirmary where he had started his practice of antiseptic surgery, for they bitterly resented an attack upon the position of their buildings, which happened to be built a few feet above a cholera pit where hundreds of bodies were still decaying!

　　But Lister worked on. For nine months there were no cases of the dreaded Hospitalism in the wards under his control. Terrible fractures and gaping wounds, which inevitably would have become septic under the old treatment, healed themselves when treated by his antiseptics and given their barrier of carbolic against the infected air. Operations performed by his sterilized instruments and cleaned with his sterilized swabs left cuts which naturally healed, when under the old system they would have broken down into gangrene or some other of the dread hospital diseases. Childbirth lost one part of its terrors, for the horror of, septic conditions starting up after the child was born became almost eliminated. It was the fight of a new idea against the old, and gradually the new won out.