Was not that medical student, that disciple lost in the crowd, an image of the new generation hungering for new ideas, more convinced than the preceding one had been of the necessity of proofs? Struck by the unstable basis of medical theories, those young men divined that the secret of progress in hospitals was to be found in the laboratories. Medicine and surgery in those days were such a contrast to what they are now that it seems as if centuries divided them. No doubt one day some professor, some medical historian, will give us a full account of that vast and immense progress. But, whilst awaiting a fully competent work of that kind, it is possible, even in a book such as this (which is, from many causes, but a hasty epitome of many very different things spread over a very simple biography), to give to a reader unfamiliar with such studies a certain idea of one of the most interesting chapters in the history of civilization, affecting the preservation of innumerable human lives. “A pin-prick is a door open to Death,” said the surgeon Velpeau. That open door widened before the smallest operation; the lancing of an abscess or a whitlow sometimes had such serious consequences that surgeons hesitated before the slightest use of the bistoury. It was much worse when a great surgical intervention was necessary, though, through the irony of things, the immediate success of the most difficult operations was now guaranteed by the progress of skill and the precious discovery of anæsthesia. The patient, his will and consciousness suspended, awoke from the most terrible operation as from a dream. But at that very moment when the surgeon’s art was emboldened by being able to disregard pain, it was arrested, disconcerted, and terrified by the fatal failures which supervened after almost every operation. The words pyæmia, gangrene, erysipelas, septicæmia, purulent infection, were bywords in those days. In the face of those terrible consequences, it had been thought better, about forty years ago, to discourage and even to prohibit a certain operation, then recently invented and practised in England and America, ovariotomy, “even,” said Velpeau, “if the reported cures be true.” In order to express the terror inspired by ovariotomy, a physician went so far as to say that it should be “classed among the attributes of the executioner.” As it was supposed that the infected air of the hospitals might be the cause of the invariably fatal results of that operation, the Assistance Publique[31] hired an isolated house in the Avenue de Meudon, near Paris, a salubrious spot. In 1863, ten women in succession were sent to that house; the neighbouring inhabitants watched those ten patients entering the house, and a short time afterwards their ten coffins being taken away. In their terrified ignorance they called that house the House of Crime. Surgeons were asking themselves whether they did not carry death with them, unconsciously scattering virus and subtle poisons.