“Even the introduction of anæsthesia, however, did not rid surgery of all its terrors. The acute pain of the operation was abolished, but the after-suffering, as I know only too well, in my early surgical days, was something dreadful to see. The parched lips of the poor sufferer, tossing uneasily during sleepless nights; wounds reeking with pus, and patients dying by scores from blood-poisoning, from erysipelas, from tetanus, from gangrene, were only too familiar sights in the pre-antiseptic days. Then, again, there arose one of these deliverers of the human race whose name can never be forgotten and whose fame will last so long as time shall endure. Jenner, Warren, and Lister are a triumvirate of names of which any profession may well be proud. Thank God, they all sprang from virile Anglo-Saxon loins! No praise, no reward, no fame is too great for them. That Lord Lister still lives to see the triumph of his marvellous services to humanity is a joy to all of us. And when the profession arose _en masse_, within the last few years, at the International Congress of Berlin, and at the meeting of the British Medical Association in Montreal, and welcomed him with cheer after cheer, it was but a feeble expression of gratitude for benefits which no words can express. “Before Lister’s day erysipelas, tetanus, gangrene, and blood-poisoning in its various phases were the constant attendant of every surgeon. They were dreaded guests at almost any operation; and when in rare cases we obtained primary union without a drop of pus, without fever, and with but little suffering, it was a marvellous achievement. Now it is precisely reversed. The surgeon who does not get primary union without a drop of pus, with no fever, and with little suffering, asks himself—what was the fault in my technic? To open the head, the abdomen, or the chest thirty years ago was almost equivalent to signing the death-warrant of a patient. The early mortality of ovariotomy was about sixty per cent.; two out of three died. Now many a surgeon can point to a series of one hundred abdominal operations with a fatality of only two or three per cent. When Sir Spencer Wells recorded his first one thousand cases of ovariotomy it was calculated that after deducting the years which the patients who died from the operation would have lived had no operation been done the net result of the thousand cases was an addition of twenty thousand years to human life. One thousand ovariotomies under antiseptic precautions at the present would certainly add at least thirty thousand years to human life. Would not such a guerdon be enough for any man?