According to Webster's pocket Medical & First Aid Dictionary, antiseptic can be defined as any substance that inhibits the action of bacteria. In the 19th century, any person undergoing a surgical operation either had their limbs amputated or lost their lives due to pain or infection. At the beginning of the 1840s, the use of anesthesia provided surgeons with the time to perfect their operations like they never had before because they were used to complete the surgery as quick as possible to reduce the agony of the patient. Although surgeons now had the time to perfect their operations, they had no intention of keeping the environment where they work, clean. They thought that what was the point of cleaning everything if almost every wound was foully infected and will dirty them anyways. .
However, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician noticed that there was a difference in death rates between the babies who were delivered by medical students and those who were delivered by midwives. The difference between the two wards was that the ward run by midwives, were generally kept clean. He observed that medical students attended to the birth immediately after performing an autopsy. They didnt wash their hands, or change their clothes. Having observed what he had observed, Semmelweis made the medical students wash their hands with a disinfecting solution of lime chloride before entering a ward. This resulted to a drop in death rate to 1.27% in two years. However, many of his colleagues refused to follow his orders and thought it to be very troublesome if they were to wash their hands every time they changed patient. .
Joseph Lister, a surgeon, explored the inflammation of wounds at Glasgow infirmary. He considered that infection was not due to bad air alone, and the wound sepsis' was a form of decomposition. In 1950s, Louis Pasteur began his research into spoilage of wine and concluded that unknown, unseen microorganisms were the cause of a variety of disorders.
