Hospital infection yesterday and today.

Cross infection has been a problem throughout the ages wherever the sick have been housed. It was particularly rife in some of the larger hospitals of Europe in the centuries before Lister, making all but the most imperative operations unthirljable. Pare in the sixteenth century complained that infection at the Hotel Dieu in Paris was so frightful that no operation could rightly be contemplated in that institution. The graphic accounts of John Bell at the beginning of the nineteenth century paint a horrifying picture.