his first operations under the new system. It was in the Glasgow
Infirmary that he worked cures which roused the astonishment of his
students, however incredulous the older generation might be. He had
formed a school and was happy in the loyal service and in the enthusiasm
of those who worked under him, and he had no desire to leave such a
fruitful field of work. But when in 1869 his father-in-law, owing to
ill-health, resigned his professorship, and a number of Edinburgh
students addressed an appeal to Lister to become a candidate for the
post, he was strongly drawn towards the city where he had married and
spent such happy years. No doubt too he and his wife wished to be near
Syme, who lived for fourteen months after his stroke, and to cheer his
declining days. Lister was elected in August 1869 and moved to Edinburgh
two months later. For a while he took a furnished house, but early in
1870 he made his home in Charlotte Square, from which he had easy access
to the gardens between Princes Street and the Castle, 'a grand place'
for his daily meditations, as he had it all to himself before breakfast.
Altogether, Edinburgh was a pleasant change to him, and refreshing; and
the one man who was likely to stir controversy, Sir James Simpson, died
six months after Lister's arrival. Among his fellow professors were men
eminent in many lines, perhaps the most striking figures being old Sir
Robert Christison of the medical faculty, Geikie the geologist, and
Blackie the classical scholar. The hospital was still run on
old-fashioned lines; but the staff were devoted to their work, from the
head nurse, Mrs. Porter, a great 'character' whose portrait has been
sketched in verse by Henley,[47] to the youngest student; and they were
ready to co-operate heartily with the new chief. The hours of work
suited Lister better than those at Glasgow, where he had begun with an
early morning visit to the Infirmary and had to find time for a daily
lecture. Here he limited himself to two lectures a week, visited the
hospital at midday, and was able to devote a large amount of time to
bacteriological study, which was his chief interest at this time.
[Note 47: W. E. Henley, poet and critic, 1849-1903. His poems, 'In
Hospital' include also a very beautiful sonnet on 'The Chief'--Lister
himself, which almost calls up his portrait to one who has once seen it:
'His brow spreads large and placid.... Soft lines of tranquil
thought.... His face at once benign and proud and shy.... His wise rare
smile.']
He stayed in Edinburgh eight years, and it was during his time here that
he saw the interest of all Europe in surgical questions quickened by the
Franco-German war, and had to realize how incomplete as yet was his
victory over the forces of destruction. Some enterprising British and
American doctors, who volunteered for field-service, came to him for
advice, and he wrote a series of short instructions for their guidance;
but he soon learnt how difficult it was to carry out his methods in the
field, where appliances were inadequate and where wounds often got a
long start before treatment could be applied. The French statistics,
compiled after the war, are appalling to read: 90 out of 100 amputations
proved fatal, and the total number of deaths in hospital worked out at
over 10,000. The Germans were in advance of the French in the
cleanliness of their methods, and some of their doctors were already
beginning to accept the antiseptic theory; but it was not till 1872 that
this principle can be said to have won the day. The hospitals on both
sides were left with a ghastly heritage of pyaemia and other diseases,
raging almost unchecked in their wards; but, in the two years after the
war, two of the most famous professors in German Universities[48] had by
antiseptic methods obtained such striking results among their patients
that the superiority of the treatment was evident; and both of them
generously gave full credit to Lister as their teacher. When he made a
long tour on the Continent in 1875, finishing up with visits to the
chief medical schools in Germany, these men were foremost in greeting
him, and he enjoyed a conspicuous triumph also at Leipzig. Sir Rickman
Godlee, commenting on the indifference of his countrymen, says that
Lister's teaching was by them 'accepted as a novelty, when it came back
to England, refurbished from Germany'. But this was not till after he
had left Edinburgh, to carry the torch of learning to the south.
[Note 48: Professor Volkmann of Halle and Professor von Nussbaum of
Munich.]
In Edinburgh his colleagues, with all their opportunities for learning
at first hand, seemed strangely indifferent to Lister's presence in
their midst, even when foreigners began to make pilgrimages to the
central shrine of antiseptics. The real encouragement which he got came,
as before, from his pupils, who thronged his lecture-room to the number
of three or four hundred, with sustained enthusiasm. In some ways it is
difficult to account for the popularity of his lectures. He made no
elaborate preparations, but was content to devote a quiet half-hour to
thinking out the subject in his arm-chair. After this he needed no
notes, having his ideas and the development of his thought so firmly in
his grasp that he could follow it out clearly and could hold the
attention of his audience. His voice, though musical, was not of great
power. He was often impeded by a slight stammer, especially at the end
of a session. He was not naturally an eloquent man, and attempted no
flights of rhetoric. But it seems impossible to deny the possession of
special ability to a man who consistently drew such large audiences
throughout a long career; and if it was the matter rather than the
manner which wove the spell, surely that is just the kind of good
speaking which Scotsmen and Englishmen have always preferred.
And so it needed an even greater effort than at Glasgow for Lister to
strike his tent and adventure himself on new ground. It is true that
London was his early home; London could give him wider fame and enable
him to make a larger income by private practice; yet it is very doubtful
whether these motives combined could have induced him to migrate again,
now that he had reached the age of fifty. But he was a man with a
mission. Some of his few converts in London held that only his presence
there could shake the prevailing apathy, and he himself felt that he
must make the effort in the interests of science.
The professorial chair to which he was invited in 1877 was at King's
College, which was relatively a small institution; its hospital was not
up to the Edinburgh standard; the classes which attended his lectures
were small. Owing to an unfortunate incident he was handicapped at the
start. When receiving a parting address from 700 of his Edinburgh
students he made an informal speech in the course of which he compared
the conditions of surgical teaching then prevailing at Edinburgh and
London, in terms which were not flattering to the southern metropolis.
Some comparison was natural in the circumstances; Lister was not
speaking for publication and had no idea that a reporter was present.
But his remarks appeared in print, with the result that might be
expected. The sting of the criticism lay in its truth, and many London
surgeons were only too ready to resent anything which might be said by
the new professor. When he had been living some time in London, Lister
succeeded in allaying the ill feeling which resulted; but at first, even
in his own hospital, he was met by coldness and opposition in his
attempt to introduce new methods. In fact, had he not laid down definite
conditions in accepting the post, he could never have made his way; but
he had stipulated for bringing with him some of the men whom he had
trained, and he was accompanied by four Edinburgh surgeons, the foremost
of whom were John Stewart, a Canadian, and Watson Cheyne, the famous
operator of the next generation. Even so he found his orders set at
naught and his work hampered by a temper which he had never known
elsewhere. In some cases the sisters entrenched themselves behind the
Secretary's rules and refused to comply, not only with the requests of
the new staff, but even with the dictates of common sense and humanity.
Another trouble arose over the system of London examinations which
tempted the students to reproduce faithfully the views of others and
discouraged men from giving time to independent research. Lister's
method of lecturing was designed to foster the spirit of inquiry, and he
would not deign to fill his lecture-room by any species of 'cramming'.
Never did his patience, his hopefulness, and his interest in the cause
have to submit to greater trials; but the day of victory was at hand.
The most visible sign of it was at the International Medical Congress
held at Amsterdam in 1879 and attended by representatives of the great
European nations. One sitting was devoted to the antiseptic system; and
Lister, after delivering an address, received an ovation so marked that
none of his fellow-countrymen could fail to see the esteem in which he
was held abroad. Even in London many of his rivals had by now been
converted. The most distinguished of them, Sir James Paget, openly
expressed remorse for his reluctance to accept the antiseptic principle
earlier, and compared his own record of failures with the successes
attained by his colleague at St. Bartholomew's Thomas Smith, the one
eminent London surgeon who had given Listerism a thorough trial. Other
triumphs followed, such as the visits in 1889 to Oxford and Cambridge to
receive Honorary Degrees, the offer of a baronetcy in 1883, and the
conferring on him in 1885 of the Prussian 'Ordre pour le merite'.[49]
But a chronicle of such external matters is wearisome in itself; and
before the climax was reached, the current of opinion was, by a strange
turn of fortune, already setting in another direction.
[Note 49: Restricted to thirty German and thirty foreign members.]
This was due to the introduction of the so-called aseptic theory so
widely prevalent to-day, of which the chief prophet in 1885 was
Professor von Bergmann of Berlin. Into the relative merits of systems,
on which the learned disagree, it is absurd for laymen to enter; nor is
it necessary to make such comparisons in order to appreciate the example
of Lister's life. The new school believe that they have gained by the
abandonment of carbolic and other antiseptics which may irritate a wound
and by trusting to the agency of heat for killing all germs. But Lister
himself took enormous pains to keep his antiseptic as remote as possible
from the tissues to whose vitality he trusted, and went half-way to meet
the aseptic doctrine. If he retained a belief in the need for carbolic
and distrusted the elaborate ritual of the modern hospital, with its
boiling of everybody and everything connected with an operation, it was
not either from blindness or from pettiness of mind. As in the case of
abandoning the spray, it was his love of simplicity which influenced
him. If the detailed precautions of the complete aseptic system are
found practicable and beneficial in a hospital, they are difficult to
realize for a country surgeon who has to work in a humbler way, and
Lister wished his procedure to be within reach of every practitioner who
needed it.
One more point must be considered before pronouncing Listerism to be
superseded. In time of war there are occasions when necessity dictates
the treatment to be followed. Wounded men, picked up on the field of
battle some hours after they were hit, are not fit subjects for a method
that needs a clear field of operation. It is then too late for aseptic
precautions, as the wound may already be teeming with bacteria. Only the
prompt use of carbolic can stay the ravages of putrefaction; and
Lister's method, so often disparaged, must have saved the lives of
thousands during the late War.
In any case there is much common ground between the two schools: each
can learn from the other, and those professors of asepticism who have
acknowledged their debt to Lister have been wiser than those who have
made contention their aim. This was never the spirit in which he
approached scientific problems.
An earlier controversy, in which his name was involved, was that which
raged round the practice of vivisection. Here Lister had practically the
whole of his profession behind him when he boldly supported the claims
of science to have benefited humanity by the experiments conducted on
animals and to have done so with a minimum of suffering to the latter.
And it was well that science had a champion whose reputation for
gentleness and moderation was so well established. Queen Victoria
herself showed a lively interest in this fiercely-debated question; and
in 1871, when Lister was appealed to by Sir Henry Ponsonby, her private
secretary, to satisfy her doubts on the subject, he wrote an admirable
reply, calm in tone and lucid in statement, in which he showed how
unfounded were the charges brought against his profession.
In 1892 his professional career was drawing to a close. In that year he
received the heartiest recognition that France could give to his work,
when he went there officially to represent the Royal Society at the
Pasteur celebration. A great gathering of scientists and others,
presided over by President Carnot, came together at the Sorbonne to
honour Pasteur's seventieth birthday. It was a dramatic scene such as
our neighbours love, when the two illustrious fellow workers embraced
one another in public, and the audience rose to the occasion. To be
acclaimed with Pasteur was to Lister a crowning honour; but a year later
fortune dealt him a blow from which he never recovered. His wife, his
constant companion and helper, was taken ill suddenly at Rapallo on the
Italian Riviera, and died in a few days; and Lister's life was sadly
changed.
He was still considerably before the public for another decade. He did
much useful work for the Royal Society, of which he became Foreign
Secretary in 1893 and President from 1895 to 1900. He visited Canada and
South Africa, received the freedom of Edinburgh in 1898 and of London in
1907, and in 1897 he received the special honour of a peerage, the only
one yet conferred on a medical man. He took an active interest in the
discoveries of Koch and Metchnikoff, preserving to an advanced age the
capacity for accepting new ideas. He was largely instrumental in
founding the Institute of Preventive Medicine now established at Chelsea
and called by his name. But his work as a surgeon was complete before
death separated him from his truest helper. In 1903 his strength began
to fail, and for the last nine years of his life, at London or at
Walmer, he was shut off from general society and lived the life of an
invalid.
[Illustration: WILLIAM MORRIS
From the painting by G. F. Watts in the National Portrait Gallery]
In 1912 he passed away by almost imperceptible degrees, in his home
by the sea, and by his own request was buried in the quiet cemetery of
West Hampstead where his wife lay. A public service was held in
Westminster Abbey, and a portrait medallion there preserves the memory
of his features. The patient toil, the even temper, the noble purpose
which inspired his life, had achieved their goal--he was a national hero
as truly as any statesman or soldier of his generation; and if,
according to his nature he wished his body to lie in a humble grave, he
deserved full well to have his name preserved and honoured in our most
sacred national shrine.
WILLIAM MORRIS
1834-96
1834. Born at Walthamstow, March 24.
1848-51. Marlborough College.
1853-5. Exeter College, Oxford.
1856. Studies architecture under Street.
1857. Red Lion Square; influence of D. G. Rossetti.
1858. _Defence of Guenevere_.
1859. Marries Miss Jane Burden.
1860-5. 'Red House', Upton, Kent.
1861. Firm of Art Decorators founded in Queen Square, Bloomsbury.
(Dissolved and refounded 1875.)
1867-8. _Life and Death of Jason_. 1868-70. _Earthly Paradise_.
1870. Tenant of Kelmscott Manor House, on the Upper Thames.
1871-3. Visits to Iceland; work on Icelandic Sagas.
1876. _Sigurd the Volsung_.
1878. Tenant of Kelmscott House, Hammersmith.
1881. Works moved to Merton.
1883-4. Active member of Social Democratic Federation.
1884-90. Founder and active member of Socialist League.
1891. Kelmscott Press founded.
1892-6. Preparation and printing of Kelmscott _Chaucer_.
1896. Death at Hammersmith, October 3.
1896. Burial at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire.
WILLIAM MORRIS
CRAFTSMAN AND SOCIAL REFORMER
In general it is difficult to account for the birth of an original man
at a particular place and time. As Carlyle says: 'Priceless Shakespeare
was the free gift of nature, given altogether silently, received
altogether silently.' Of his childhood history has almost nothing to
relate, and what is true of Shakespeare is true in large measure of
Burns, of Shelley, of Keats. Even in an age when records are more
common, we can only discern a little and can explain less of the silent
influences at work that begin to make the man. There are few things more
surprising than that, in an age given up chiefly to industrial
development, two prosperous middle-class homes should have given birth
to John Ruskin and William Morris, so alien in temper to all that
traditionally springs from such a soil. In the case of Morris there is
nothing known of his ancestry to explain his rich and various gifts.
From a child he seemed to have found some spring within himself which
drew him instinctively to all that was beautiful in nature, in art, in
books. His earliest companions were the Waverley Novels, which he began
at the age of four and finished at seven; his earliest haunt was Epping
Forest, where he roamed and dreamed through many of the years of his
youth.
His father, who was in business in the City of London, as partner in a
bill-broking firm, lived at different times at Walthamstow and at
Woodford; and the hills of the forest, in some places covered with thick
growth of hornbeam or of beech, in others affording a wide view over the
levels of the lower Thames, impressed themselves so strongly on the
boy's memory and imagination that this scenery often recurred in the
setting of tales which he wrote in middle life.
There was no need of external aid to develop these tastes; and Morris
was fortunate in going to a school which did no violence to them by
forcing him into other less congenial pursuits. Marlborough College, at
the time when he went there in 1848, had only been open a few years. The
games were not organized but left to voluntary effort; and during his
three or four years at school Morris never took part in cricket or
football. In the latter game, at any rate, he should have proved a
notable performer on unorthodox lines, impetuous, forcible, and burly
as he was. But he found no reason to regret the absence of games, or to
feel that time hung heavy on his hands. The country satisfied his wants,
the Druidic stones at Avebury, the green water-meadows of the Kennet,
the deep glades of Savernake Forest. So strong was the spell of nature,
that he hardly felt the need for companionship; and, as chance had not
yet thrown him into close relations with any friend of similar tastes,
he lived much alone.
It was a different matter at Oxford, to which he proceeded in January
1853. Among those who matriculated at Exeter College that year was a
freshman from Birmingham named Edward Burne Jones; and within a few days
Morris had begun a friendship with him which lasted for his whole life
and was the source of his greatest happiness. For more than forty years
their names were associated, and so they will remain for generations to
come in Exeter College Chapel, where may be seen the great tapestry of
the Nativity designed by one and executed by the other. Burne-Jones had
not yet found his vocation as a painter; he came to Oxford like Morris
with the wish to take Holy Orders. He was of Welsh family with a Celtic
fervour for learning, and a Celtic instinct for what was beautiful, and
at King Edward's School he had made friends with several men who came up
to Pembroke College about the same time. Their friendship was extended
to his new acquaintance from Marlborough. Here Morris found himself in
the midst of a small circle who shared his enthusiasm for literature and
art, and among whom he quickly learned to express those ideas which had
been stirring his heart in his solitary youth. Through the knowledge
gained by close observation and a retentive memory, through his
impetuosity and swift decision, Morris soon became a leader among them.
Carlyle and Ruskin, Keats and Tennyson, were at this time the most
potent influences among them; and when Morris was not arguing and
declaiming in the circle at Pembroke, he was sitting alone with
Burne-Jones at Exeter reading aloud to him for hours together French
romances and other mediaeval tales. Young men of to-day, with a wealth
of books on their shelves and of pictures on their walls, with popular
reproductions bringing daily to their doors things old and new, can
little realize the thrill of excitement with which these men discovered
and enjoyed a single new poem of Tennyson or an early drawing by Millais
or Rossetti. How they were quickened by ever fresh delight in the beauty
and strangeness of such things, how they responded to the magic of
romance and dreamed of a day when they should themselves help in the
creation of such work, how they started a magazine of their own and
essayed short flights in prose or verse, can best be read in the volumes
which Lady Burne-Jones[50] has dedicated to the memory of her husband.
This period is of capital importance in the life of William Morris, and
the year 1855 especially was fraught with momentous decisions.
[Note 50: _Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones_, by G. B.-J., 2 vols.
(Macmillan, 1904).]
Like Burne-Jones he had gone up to Oxford intending to take Holy Orders
in the Church of England; but the last three years had taught him that
his interest lay elsewhere. The spirit of faith, of reverence, of love
for his fellow men still attracted him to Christianity; but he could not
subscribe to a body of doctrine or accept the authority of a single
Church. His ideal shifted gradually. At one time he hoped to found a
brotherhood which was to combine art with religion and to train
craftsmen for the service of the Church; but he was more fitted to work
in the world than in the cloister, and the social aspect of this
foundation prevailed over the religious. Nor was it mere self-culture to
which he aspired. The arts as he understood them were one field, and a
wide field, for enlarging the powers of men and increasing their
happiness, for continuing all that was most precious in the heritage of
the past and passing on the torch to the future; in this field there was
work for many labourers and all might be serving the common good.
His own favourite study was the thirteenth century, when princes and
merchants, monks and friars, poets and craftsmen had combined to exalt
the Church and to beautify Western Europe; and he wished to recreate the
nineteenth century in its spirit. And so while Burne-Jones discovered
his true gift in the narrower field of painting, Morris began his
apprenticeship in the master craft of architecture, and passed from one
art to another till he had covered nearly the whole field of endeavour
with ever-growing knowledge of principle and restless activity of hand
and eye. His father had died in 1847; and when Morris came of age he
inherited a fortune of about £900 a year and was his own master. Before
the end of 1855 he imparted to his mother his decision about taking
Orders. The Rubicon was crossed; but on which road he was to reach his
goal was not settled for many years. Twice he had to retrace his steps
from a false start and begin a fresh career. The year 1856 saw him still
working at Oxford, in the office of Street, the architect. Two more
years (1857-8) saw him labouring at easel pictures under the influence
of Rossetti, though he also published his first volume of poetry at this
time. The year 1859 found him married, and for the time absorbed in the
making of a home, but still feeling his way towards the choice of a
profession.