“This new epoch meant not only that medical and surgical disorders were henceforth to be treated in a much more scientific and rational way than they had been in the past, but that one of the greatest scientific conquests of the ages was underway—the intelligent prevention of disease. Preventive medicine had been born. Soon thereafter a new and unprecedented popular interest in medical matters became prevalent. Newspapers, magazines and the public forum took a hand in popularizing this new knowledge of the nature of disease and the methods of preventing disease, which was founded on the new knowledge. Disease began to be looked on no longer as only a mysterious dispensation of Providence, but as a thing which, as scientific medicine advanced, was more and more to come under the knowledge and control of science. “In no domain of modern medicine have greater advances been made than in surgery, due chiefly to the discovery of the role which germs play in the causation of surgical troubles. Because of the discovery of the necessity of asepsis (the absence of germs) in surgical operations and its practical application, operations, which, if done thirty years ago, would have been almost invariably fatal, can now be done nearly with impunity. Then, surgical operations in large surgical clinics were done by men in Prince Albert coats. Today, the surgeon and his assistants are arrayed in sterilized white gowns and rubber gloves with caps for their heads and special coverings for mouth and nose, which are worn in order to prevent any unfiltered, contaminated vapor from these orifices coming in contact with the freshly made wound. Where proper precautions are taken, and no pus or other filth has come in contact with the wound, some of the most extensive operations are followed by immediate repair, without the formation of pus in the wound. To enumerate even a small part of the triumphs of modern surgery would occupy too much space and is uncalled for here, and these triumphs would have been impossible before the advent of surgical cleanliness.