7. Antiseptic Surgical Techniques
Before this, a lot of patients who went under the knife were dying of infections caused by unclean environments. There were a few ways of sterilising wounds in ancient times but it wasn’t until Louis Pasteur found that micro organisms caused spoilage and could be transported by air, that things really changed. He did more experiments to prove this and soon came up with the process we know as pasteurisation.
Following on from this, Dr Ignaz Semmelweis used the information to reduce infections by getting doctors to wash their hands between operations. Knowing all this meant techniques could be developed to kill the micro organisms that caused the infections.