英语四级阅读200篇:Unit 48 passage1

　　Passage 1

　　Making Surgery Safe

　　A French chemist in Lille studying why wine and beer turned bad in the vats ; an English surgeon in Glasgow desperately fighting to save his patients from the awful scourges of disease as wounds or the incisions from their operations become septic; a Hungarian doctor in Vienna equally desperate at the terrible death-roll of the mothers after the children were born in his maternity hospital.

　　Pasteur; Lister; Semmelweis.

　　In the early 1860s these three men knew nothing of each other, but each of them was working towards a discovery which saved millions of lives, revolutionized surgery, gave vast results in matters of our food, and supplied the clue to hundreds of diseases. That discovery was germs, microbes, the minute organisms which could only be seen through the most powerful microscopes, but which bred a life of their own able to destroy the living tissues infected by them.

　　It was in surgery that the most spectacular results of that discovery were obtained, and it was there that the battle between the new idea and the old prejudices was fought out most dramatically. Its coming into that field changed the whole conditions under which operations were performed, and so enormously extended its possibilities that we reckon the art in two eras: one covering the history of mankind from the earliest times to this time of Lister; the other, the period since. For in ancient India, in Egypt, Greece and Rome, surgery was practiced, and the instruments and knowledge were already remarkable. If it stagnated under mediaeval influences, it revived again under such men as Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, and moved steadily forward through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as human anatomy and physiology yielded their secrets to the scientists. In the nineteenth century one great discovery came to the aid of the surgeon when James Young Simpson experimented with anasthetics and so gave him time to perform his delicate work on patients unconscious of pain.

　　But one terrible thing remained wrong.

　　In every hospital, whether form some original injury or from the surgeons knife, wounds became inflamed, turned gangrenous, or developed some similar terrible degeneration, and in a few days the patient died as the whole blood stream became poisoned. Terrible epidemics of this Hospitalism , as they called it, would sweep through the wards. Often the authorities would deliberately close a hospital for a time to try to stamp out the plague. But always it returned. Even the simplest operation the removal of a single joint of a finger, the lancing of an abscess would prove fatal; and no operation was possible on the delicate parts of the human body, for almost inevitably they became infected, and however skilful the surgeon had been the patient died.

　　In a great Glasgow hospital a brilliant young surgeon named Joseph Lister fought this evil. He was an earnest young man, son of a Quaker family, and he had consecrated his life to find out hoe to procure such a result in all wounds. He had already set his feet along the right track by studying inflammation, making strange experiments with the foot of a frog and the wing of a bat under his microscope.

　　Said another great scientist: In the field of observation, chance only favours the mind which is prepared.

　　Listers mind was marvelously prepared. Other men accepted defeat; they thought vaguely that there were gases in the air which caused wounds to become septic. Listers own teacher had stated that surgery had reached finality; but Lister worked on. He suspected that there were minute organisms which entered wounds and set up their own life-destroying life there, degenerating human tissue as the greenfly will destroy the rose. He began his experiments for some substance which would destroy this lower form of life, or build some barrier between it and the open wound.

　　He found what he wanted in a powerful disinfectant, a by-product of coal-tar , which he learned that the authorities at Carlisle were using on their sewage. It was called carbolic. Lister introduced it into the hospital wards, into the operating room, into his surgical bandages. He dipped his instruments in it, and his swabs were rinsed in it. He even sprayed the air around with a fine mist of carbolic while he performed his operations. Joseph Lister had introduced antiseptic surgery.

　　It is fascinating that away in his maternity hospital in Vienna, Dr Semmelweis had reached the same conclusion. There, with greater violence even than in Britain, the thing flared into an unreasoned persecution of the pioneer by the old traditional men. Semmelweis published his idea of antiseptics; he was persecuted, reviled, laughed at, and dismissed from his post for advocating this new method. He was driven temporarily insane; but, recovering, continued his experiments in private. In one of them he contracted the blood-poisoning he was seeking to eliminate and died: a martyr to truth, a prophet of progress who gave his life in a great cause.

　　Over in France the chemist, Louis Pasteur, had just published his studies of the cause of fermentation in wines. He demonstrated that the dust of the air contained minute organisms which increased and multiplied themselves in a kind of fungus when they came into contact with the right conditions. He conducted the most careful experiments, and demonstrated that fermentation which took place in the dust-laden air of Paris did not do so in the pure glacial air on the high Alps.

　　When Lister read of these experiments he saw that in them, as had long suspected, lay the final clue to his own problem. It was not until years afterwards that he heard of Semmelweis, but already an opposition similar to that which broke the Hungarian was growing here. Simpson himself, who as the pioneer of anesthetics had suffered a similar persecution for his own innovations, led the attack; and soon the old brigade of the medical men were bringing all their weapons of ridicule and wild accusation to bear on the Spray and Gauze school, as they called Listers methods. One of the ugliest fights of Listers career was with the Glasgow Infirmary where he had started his practice of antiseptic surgery, for they bitterly resented an attack upon the position of their buildings, which happened to be built a few feet above a cholera pit where hundreds of bodies were still decaying!

　　But Lister worked on. For nine months there were no cases of the dreaded Hospitalism in the wards under his control. Terrible fractures and gaping wounds, which inevitably would have become septic under the old treatment, healed themselves when treated by his antiseptics and given their barrier of carbolic against the infected air. Operations performed by his sterilized instruments and cleaned with his sterilized swabs left cuts which naturally healed, when under the old system they would have broken down into gangrene or some other of the dread hospital diseases. Childbirth lost one part of its terrors, for the horror of, septic conditions starting up after the child was born became almost eliminated. It was the fight of a new idea against the old, and gradually the new won out.

　　1. The passage gives a general description of three surgeons contributions to securing surgery.

　　2. The discovery of anesthetics belonged to the first era of surgery.

　　3. Surgery made much progress in the Middle Ages.

　　4. Surgery was the only field that was influenced by the discovery of microbes.

　　5. Listers own teacher was one of the men who accepted defeat.

　　6. No operation was possible on the delicate parts of human body because, almost inevitably, the surgeon himself became infected and died, no matter how skillful he may have been.

　　7. If absolute scientific aseptic conditions were impossible, antiseptic ones were insisted upon.

　　8. The discovery of ______changed the whole conditions under which operations were performed.

　　9. After an operation the patient would die in a few days because______was poisoned.

　　10. Both Lister and Semmelweis were pioneers of______surgery.

　　I. Y 2. Y 3. N 4. N 5. Y 6. N 7. NG 8. microbes 9. the whole blood stream 10. antiseptic

　　希望考生能够认认真真准备，争取能够顺利通过考试。