This paper focuses on Lister’s inaugural lecture at King’s College, London, in October 1877. As the new Professor of Clinical Surgery, Lister had much to report, including impressively high survival rates from complex operations previously regarded as foolhardy. Instead, he chose to address the processes of fermentation in wine, blood and milk. His reasons are not obvious to a modern audience, ...

In conjunction with environmental pollution studies, it often is necessary to analyze field-collected eggs that are partially decomposed. The effect of putrefaction upon residue analysis, however, is not known and the experiment reported here was designed to determine if recoveries of DDT, DDE, and DDD differed between fresh and addled eggs and also if putrefaction causes appreciable degradatio...

While starch and fat digestion can be carried out satisfactorily without the help of pancreatic enzymes, the proteases are critical to proper protein digestion. Incomplete digestion of proteins creates a number of problems for the body including the development of allergies and formation of toxic substances produced during putrefaction. Putrefaction refers to the breakdown of protein material b...

Fermentation of undigested proteins in human gastrointestinal tract (gut) by the resident microbiota, a process called bacterial putrefaction, can sometimes disrupt the gut homeostasis. In this process, essential amino acids (e.g., histidine, tryptophan, etc.) that are required by the host may be utilized by the gut microbes. In addition, some of the products of putrefaction, like ammonia, putr...

This study concerns thanatochemistry, an important sub-branch of forensic toxicology dealing with uncontrolled biochemical post-mortem processes resulting in autosynthesis of endogenous chemical compounds. Knowledge of chemical structure of endogenous products formed in the course of autolysis and putrefaction is of paramount importance for diagnosis and indispensable for interpretation of typi...

Putrefaction of cancers in infrequent. Nonetheless, it presents a difficult clinical problem of foulness. We prepared 5% antibiotic pastes by adding sodium polyacrylate to aliquots of antibiotic solutions, and applied them to putrefactive lesions in 4 cases of rectal cancer, 2 of breast cancer and 1 of tongue cancer. The putrefaction was promptly brought under control in all of them, permitting...