The steady advance of aseptic surgery has slowly but surely brought about the results which Simpson strove to attain by a radical measure. The enemy which had baffled surgeons for centuries was revealed by Lister. He sent surgeons smiling into the operating-room practically certain of success instead of dreading the terrible onslaught upon their own handiwork of the formerly unseen and unknown destroyer. The death rate of operations is being daily brought nearer and nearer to vanishing point. In his review of the progress of wound treatment during the Victorian Era published in the Diamond Jubilee number of _The Practitioner_, Mr. Watson Cheyne says the mortality of major operations does not now exceed in hospitals more than three or four per cent., and this is made up practically entirely by cases admitted almost moribund and operated on _in extremis_ with faint hope of survival. The field of surgery, too, has been vastly enlarged, and the term "major operation" includes not merely operations of necessity, undertaken through ages past as the only possible means of saving life, but also operations which have become possible only in recent years--some of them performed merely to make the patient "more comfortable," or even only "more beautiful." And this glorious result is due, as Mr. Cheyne truly says, to the immortal genius of Lister. In 1867 Simpson propounded in the _Medical Times and Gazette_ a proposal for stamping out smallpox and other infectious diseases such as scarlet fever and measles. In spite of vaccination, which, however, was imperfectly carried out, smallpox alone carried off five thousand lives annually in Great Britain. A serious outbreak of rinderpest in the British Islands amongst cattle had recently been arrested and exterminated by the slaughter of all affected animals. The disease spread as smallpox did by contagion, and Simpson fell to wondering why smallpox could not also be exterminated. His paper was a noteworthy contribution to the then infant science of Public Health, and his proposal, which was, however, universally regarded as impracticable, sprang from his courageous enthusiasm as did that concerning hospitals. He suggested that the place of the pole-axe in the extermination of rinderpest might in the arrest of smallpox be taken by complete isolation, and he laid down simple but rigid rules for its enforcement. An attempt was made to utilise these a few years after when an epidemic of fatal violence broke out in Edinburgh. He was in no way an anti-vaccinationist, but his isolation measures were too strong for the people in those days. We are not surprised that he boldly proposed this measure, for he related glaring instances of neglect of the simplest precautions. Beggars held up infants with faces encrusted with active smallpox into the very faces of passers-by in the streets of Edinburgh; and on one occasion a woman was found in Glasgow serving out sweetmeats to the children of a school with her