Antiseptics

Antiseptics I do agree that it was a great breakthrough in medicine and that antiseptic‘s in surgery was a great achievement. Also the table does show that there was a 30% drop in the amount of deaths that occurred between 1867 -70 in surgery. Although the use of carbonic acid has proved to be a huge step forward in medicine, it also had its set back, for example the use of spraying diluted carbonic acid into the room filled it with an acidic mist. Even though this acidic mist didn’t harm the person being operating on, for the doctors who worked operating on patients all the time the acid began to harm their skin especially their finger tips affecting the quality of their surgery. Also carbonic acid could be used to clean blood stained aprons by doing this it killed all the germs that were on the apron caused by the blood and operating utensils could also be cleaned in the same way. In the writing to accompany the source it says that “antiseptics would be widely accepted as a medical breakthrough” but this isn’t entirely true as antiseptics along with anaesthetics weren’t widely accepted in the 1800’s. New things weren’t accepted straight away because people simply didn’t trust them and many people thought Louis Pasteur’s germ theory was at the least barbaric and when Joseph lister looked into his work on the germ theory people just laughed at him and made jokes about his work with antiseptics.