Galen's Innovations
During early surgery, many patients died due to infection. In fact, many doctors, including Galen had thought that infection was a normal, even necessary, part of healing. Many doctors believed that infection was caused by the foul-smelling air in their hospital wards. They saw no connection between their themselves and their unwashed surgical supplies. Then in the second half of the 19th century an English surgeon named Joseph Lister wanted to find out why his patients were dying of infection. He was more open minded when it came to the cause of infection. In 1864 he read that Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, had discovered that there were microscopic living thing, microorganisms, that caused fermentation, the process where sugar substances