In no department of science, perhaps, has progress brought such immediate benefit to the people as in that of surgery and medicine. The introduction of anæsthetics has been mentioned in an earlier chapter; the present year, 1897, is the jubilee anniversary of that blessed event. The vaccination laws were consolidated in 1871, and universal vaccination insisted on, with the result that a loathsome disease, which formerly brought unspeakable misery upon all civilised nations has been practically vanquished. The deaths from small-pox in England, which, at the close of the last century, were reckoned at 3,000 per million, had sunk in the decade from 1878-87 to 54 per million. Attempts have been made persistently by a small minority to resist compulsory vaccination. Persons inclined to listen to arguments against this legislation on the score of undue interference with liberty, should study the Report of the Local Government Board upon an outbreak of small-pox in Sheffield in 1887-88. Of 6,088 persons attacked 590 died; among children under ten years of age, 5 per 1,000 of those vaccinated were attacked and ·09 per 1,000 died; of the unvaccinated, 101 per 1,000 were attacked and 44 per 1,000 died. [Illustration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Miss Acland._ PROFESSOR RUSKIN. John Ruskin was born in London in 1819, and matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1836. He published the first volume of "Modern Painters" in 1841, and was elected first Slade Professor of Art in the University of Oxford, 1870.] [Illustration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Elliott & Fry._ LORD LISTER, P.R.S. Born 1827. Discovered the antiseptic method in surgery. Created a Baronet in 1883, and a Baron in 1897.] Although it is the name of a Frenchman, the late M. Pasteur, which is most conspicuously associated with recent progress in pathology, it was Sir Joseph (now Lord) Lister who was led by Pasteur's researches into the theory of fermentation to discover the antiseptic system of surgery. He employed carbolic acid, previously known as little more than a laboratory product, in destroying microbes which had found access to a wound, and thereby first made surgery scientific. But Lister did more than that; the antiseptic treatment was superseded in turn by the aseptic, in which, by sterilising everything that might come in contact with wounds, access was refused altogether to microbes, and henceforward operations surpassing the most ambitious dreams of the old school of surgery were rendered possible. From the work of Pasteur and Lister has arisen the science of bacteriology, which, in the hands of Professor Koch, of Berlin, and others, is being developed into the systematic "cultivation" of the germs of specific diseases. [Illustration: _From a Photograph_} {_by W. & D. Downey._ HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN, 1897. The authorized Diamond Jubilee Portrait.]