information:extraction
Pasteur

At the end of 1864 or during the spring of 1865 (sources vary) while walking home with Thomas Anderson, the chemistry professor at Glasgow and discussing putrefaction, Anderson drew Lister's attention to the latest research of the French chemist Louis Pasteur, who had discovered living things that caused fermentation and putrefaction. At that time, Lister was not a wide reader of continental literature, began reading the weekly journal Comptes rendus hebdomadaires of the French Academy of Sciences through the years 1860-1863 where Pasteur discussed fermentation and putrefaction.

The two papers that Anderson recommended to Lister was Sur les corpuscules organisés qui existent dans l'atmosphère, examen de la doctrine des générations spontanées 1861 (On the organized particles that exist in the atmosphere, examination of the doctrine of spontaneous generations). In this paper, Pasteur disproved the theory of spontaneous generation by proving the hypothesis that life in boiled infusions arose from spores. He also proved that particles in the air could be cultivated; and if they were introduced from the air, into a sterile liquid, they would reappear and multiply in the liquid. The second paper that Lister read that day was Pasteur's magnum opus, titled Examen du rôle attribué au gaz oxygène atmosphérique dans la destruction des matières animales et végétales après la mort 1863 (Examination of the role attributed to atmospheric oxygen gas in the destruction of animal and plant matter after death). published on 29 June 1863. The paper concluded that fermentation, putrefaction and slow combustion destroyed organic matter and these were necessary processes for life to exist. Pasteur learned that slow combustion was related to the anaerobic conditions that were present if microorganisms were present.

Several other papers would directly influence Lister's work on microorganisms. The third paper was the Mémoire sur la fermentation appelée lactique (Extrait par l'auteur) (Memoir on the so-called lactic acid fermentation (Extracted by the author)) that was published in 1857 and describes the discovery of the microbe that is responsible for the process of fermentation in beer yeast. The fourth paper was the Memoire sur la Fermentation Alcoolique (Memoir on Alcoholic Fermentation) that was published in Annales de chimie et de physique in 1860. Pasteur described the living beings, microorganisms in yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae that were responsible for the effervescent change that led to fermentation. The last paper by Pasteur was the Animalcules infusoires vivant sans gaz oxygène libre et déterminant des fermentations, (Animal Infusoria Living in the Absence of Free Oxygen and their fermentations) The paper that was presented in 1861, was seminal in enabling Lister to understand the nature of sepsis, where the bodies response to infections leads to injury in the tissue and organs. Pasteur's research led him to believe the ferment that produced Butyric acid was a microbe that lived in the absence of oxygen. The last paper that Lister found important was "Recherches sur la putréfaction" (Research on putrefaction) that concluded stating "...that putrefecation is determined by living ferments".

Lister was not the only surgeon who was interested in Pasteur's research. Thomas Spencer Wells, who was surgeon to Queen Victoria, had emphasised the significance of Pasteur's work at a meeting of the British Medical Association in 1864, stating " applying the knowledge for which we are indebted to Pasteur of the presence in the atmosphere of organic germs... it is easy to understand that some germs find their most appropriate nutriment in the secretions from wounds, or in pus, and that they so modify it as to convert it into a poison when absorbed". However, Wells did not have an experiment to demonstrate the germ theory and was unable to develop the techniques to put it into practice.