Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, surgery had positively retrograded; the mortality after operations was infinitely less in the preceding centuries, because antisepsis was practised unknowingly, though cauterizations by fire, boiling liquids and disinfecting substances. In a popular handbook published in 1749, and entitled _Medicine and Surgery for the Poor_, we read that wounds should be kept from the contact of air; it was also recommended not to touch the wound with fingers or instruments. “It is very salutary, when uncovering the wound in order to dress it, to begin by applying over its whole surface a piece of cloth dipped into hot wine or brandy.” Good results had been obtained by the great surgeon Larrey, under the first Empire, by hot oil, hot brandy, and unfrequent dressings. But, under the influence of Broussais, the theory of inflammation caused a retrogression in surgery. Then came forth basins for making poultices, packets of charpie (usually made of old hospital sheets merely washed), and rows of pots of ointment. It is true that, during the second half of the last century, a few attempts were made to renew the use of alcoholized water for dressings. In 1868, at the time when the mortality after amputation in hospitals was over sixty per cent., Surgeon Léon Le Fort banished sponges, exacted from his students scrupulous cleanliness and constant washing of hands and instruments before every operation, and employed alcoholized water for dressings. But though he obtained such satisfactory results as to lower, in his wards at the Hôpital Cochin, the average of mortality after amputations to twenty-four per cent., his colleagues were very far from suspecting that the first secret for preventing fatal results after operations consisted in a reform of the dressings.