MR. LISTER’S ANTISEPTIC METHOD 
BY 
LEWIS A. STIMSON, M.D. 
SURGEON TO THE J’RESBYTERIAN AND BELLEVUE HOSPITALS 
[REPRINTED FROM T1IF. EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT OF THE “ARCHIVES OF 
. MEDICINE,” FEBRUARY, 1880] 
NEW YORK 
G. 1’. PUTNAM’S SONS 
182 FIFTH AVENUE 
I 880 MR. LISTER’S ANTISEPTIC METHOD. 
Nine years have passed since Mr. Lister began to use the spray 
engine and carbolized gauze in the dressing of surgical wounds 
and injuries. For several years previous to 1871 he had been 
experimenting with carbolic acid in surgical dressings, but the in- 
troduction of his method, as it stands, dates from that year. The 
story of its fortunes must be familiar to all. Like other surgical 
novelties, it found some ready and even eager to test it, some dis- 
posed to deny the correctness of the principles upon which it is 
based, and many, whose enthusiasm had been chilled by frequent 
disappointments, simply indifferent to its unverified claims. This 
period of indifference or mild interest did not last long. Isolated 
reports of remarkable successes obtained by its aid appeared in 
the journals ; hostile criticism, which in some cases seemed to 
have its origin in personal rivalry and competition, stimulated in- 
quiry ; and towards the end of the year 1872, a German surgeon 
who was on the point of closing his wards on account of the 
frightful mortality in them from pyaemia and erysipelas, deter- 
mined as a last resource to give the method a trial. His success 
with it was immediate and unquestionable. During the fifteen 
months following its adoption 716 patients were received into the 
hospital, and 4,000 treated as “ out-door ” patients ; among these, 
traumatic erysipelas occured eight times, pyaemia three times, and 
septicaemia once under the Lister dressing ; there was not a single 2 
LEWIS A. ST IM SON. 
case of acute diffuse phlegmon or purulent oedema ; thirty-one 
cases of compound fracture of the limbs were treated conserva- 
tively without a single death, whereas previously, twelve out of 
sixteen such injuries to the leg treated by the open method had 
terminated fatally. 
Similar testimony came from other quarters, and in 1876 the 
general belief in the value of the method and the recognition of 
the merit of its originator, were shown in his selection as President 
of the Surgical section of the Medical Congress which met in 
Philadelphia that year. In 1877, he was called to London and 
appointed Surgeon Extraordinary to the Queen, and Professor of 
Surgery at King’s College, taking the place made vacant by the 
death of Sir William Fergusson. 
With general interest in the method came general discussion of 
its details and the causes of its success. Modifications of all 
kinds were introduced ; by some as avowed partisans, by others 
who accepted its central idea but thought many of its minutiae un- 
necessary ; and by some, less generously perhaps, to approximate 
it to older methods and show that its good results were due to 
causes not suspected by the author. Borax, salicylic acid, thymol, 
were in turn substituted for carbolic acid, washing of the wound 
with a strong solution at the end of an operation was made to do 
duty for the use of the spray during it, lint wet with carbolized oil 
took the place of the gauze, and the simple addition of daily 
washings with carbolic acid was claimed by some to be all that 
was necessary to make an old method equal to the new. 
A new term corresponding to the new method made its appear- 
ance in surgical literature. The followers of Mr. Lister saw in 
putrefaction the source of all preventable surgical complications, 
and their effort therefore was to prevent putrefaction. Theirs 
was antiseptic surgery. Against this restriction of the term many 
have protested, and Mr. Savory in his brilliant address before the 
British Medical Association last summer, regretted the confusion 
in the current employmenc of the phrase. According to his view, 
all surgery is antiseptic which aims to secure speedy repair and 
healthiness of wounds “by the most scrupulous cleanliness, not LISTENS ANTISEPTIC METHOD. 
3 
only in the common, but in the surgical sense, which means the 
prevention or removal or destruction of all matter which may 
prove poisonous.” As thus understood, he says, the term is simply 
equivalent to “ good surgery,” and is therefore superfluous. Upon 
this point we venture to differ from him. Antiseptic surgery, as 
generally understood, aims at the absolute prevention of putrefac- 
tion, not at the mere removal of its products ; and although Mr. 
Savory’s surgery may be as “ good ” as Mr. Lister’s, we certainly 
need a term to distinguish between the widely different methods 
by which the respective results are obtained, and what term can 
be more appropriate than the one which indicates the principle 
involved. 
The question of the comparative excellence of the results has 
been warmly debated, and Mr. Lister’s opponents have found a 
formidable argument in the fact that his statistics have not hitherto 
been published. To the report of remarkable cases, of new opera- 
tions successfully carried out, they reply that statements of this 
kind have never been wanting in favor of any novelty ; and Mr. 
Bryant, referring to this, has said somewhat harshly that “ the 
publication of isolated cases, however good, proves nothing, 
whereas the withholding of the whole suggests much.” To pub- 
lished German statistics English surgeons have replied that the 
results could be considered good only by comparison with the in- 
excusably bad ones previously obtained in the same hospitals, and 
that they were actually much inferior to those obtained by them- 
selves by other methods. 
In support of this statement, Mr. Savory presented in the ad- 
dress above referred to, a tabulated report of the cases of blood- 
poisoning that had followed injury or operation, during a period 
of three years at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. We condense the 
tables as follows : 
Total 
Cases. 
Percent- 
age of 
Deaths. 
Pyaemia. 
Erysipelas. 
Percentage of 
Blood-poisoning. 
Cases 
Deaths 
Cases 
Deaths 
Cases 
Deaths 
INJURY . . 
2862 
7-47 
6 
6 
22 
4 
I.05 
0.42 
OPERATION 
1235 
5.82 
11 
10 
38 
8 
3-96 
1.44 4 
LEWIS A. STEM SON. 
All the operations included in these tables, he says, were oi 
some magnitude ; most of them were capital ones ; trivial opera- 
tions and those for hernia, ovariotomy, and on the eye, were for 
obvious reasons excluded. 
While Mr. Savory and his three colleagues differed in regard to 
certain details of treatment, they were entirely in accord as to 
the chief objects in view. “ Cleanliness in the surgical sense, 
and rest in the physiological sense, may be said to be the leading 
aims.” They watch the actual condition of the wound very 
carefully, and use freely antiseptics of various kinds. Constant 
attention is paid to keeping the air of the wards pure and free 
from any suspicious odor; they avoid any tendency to over- 
crowding of wounds in a ward, and, finally, they attach the 
highest importance to the condition of the patient before opera- 
tion. Mr. Savory’s own practice, as illustrated in the amputation 
of a breast or of a limb, is as follows : All hemorrhage is care- 
fully arrested, usually with the carbolized cat-gut ligature ; blood 
clots are removed from the surface of the wound by means of 
clean water or sponges just rinsed out of it ; the edges are 
brought together with silk sutures placed at intervals of one or 
two inches. If the patient is old, in poor condition, or fat, and 
there is reason to anticipate free discharge, he inserts one or two 
thin strips of gutta percha or threads of cat-gut into the wound. 
Then a layer of lint soaked in oil containing two per cent, of 
carbolic acid is placed over the wound ; over that again two or 
more layers of dry lint, with or without cotton wool, so arranged 
as to secure by gentle and equable pressure accurate coaptation 
of the cut surfaces, and made fast by strapping or bandages so 
placed that they can be removed with the least disturbance. 
Usually this dressing is not disturbed for forty-eight hours. If, 
on examination, the wound is found in a satisfactory condition, 
the dressing is repeated as before ; if there is any evidence of 
retention of the discharges, he relieves it by carefully separating 
the edges of the wound with a clean probe, or by removing one 
or more stitches ; if the discharge becomes at all profuse, if the 
edges do not remain in contact, or if they show a blush or much LIS TER' SAN TISEP TIC ME TIIOD. 
5 
tension, he substitutes a bread and water poultice for the previous 
dressing, and continues it until the deeper portion of the wound 
has closed, washing the wound at each dressing with tepid water 
containing permanganate of potash, or some other powerful and 
unirritating antiseptic. 
To this address and these statistics Mr. Lister replied with a 
detailed account of 32 cases of operations upon, or injuries to 
joints, prepared by Mr. Watson Cheyne, and published in the 
British Medical journal, November 29, 1879, and with a 
resume of the results obtained by him at the Royal Infirmary of 
Edinburgh between November, 1871, and August, 1877, the latter 
being presented at a meeting of a branch of the British Medical 
Association, held at St. Thomas’s Hospital, December 3, 1879. 
His list, tabulated to correspond with Mr. Savory’s, is as follows : 
Total 
Deaths 
Deaths by 
Blood-poisoning 
Cases 
No. 
Per cent. 
No. 
Per cent. 
INJPRY 
72 
4 
5-7 
0 
0 
MAJOR OPERATIONS 
725 
37 
5-i 
6. 
0.82 
Of the operations, 292 were for various reasons not treated 
antiseptically, and these gave 4 deaths by blood-poisoning ; the 
remaining 553 cases treated antiseptically give only 2 deaths by 
blood-poisoning, one of them due to pyaemia after amputatidn of 
the breast, the other due to erysipelas. 
The excellence of these results, both absolute and relative, 
cannot be questioned ; but their value would be enhanced by a 
knowledge of the details of each fatal case, for, as Mr. Savory 
eloquently said, in the keen and noble rivalry which has sprung 
up between surgeons and institutions to reduce mortality due to 
blood-poisoning to the lowest possible terms, the judgment will 
be swayed by the desire, and in the anxiety to escape what has 
happily become almost the disgrace of the occurrence of blood- 
poisoning in any case under one’s care, the signs of it are rather 
open to be misinterpreted, or explained away, or called by some 6 
LEWIS A. S TIM SON. 
other name. Thus it would be interesting and valuable to know 
the causes of death in the three cases of spina bifida and one of 
hydrocephalus, treated by Mr. Lister by the introduction, under 
antiseptic precautions, of two or three horsehairs, all of which 
terminated fatally, but in none of which is the death charged to 
blood-poisoning. Certainly, if the deaths were in any way at- 
tributable to the operation the fact should be made known, both 
in the interests of science and to check the manifest and growing 
tendency to believe that antiseptic precautions justify recourse to 
operative interference in cases and under conditions where here- 
tofore it has been considered entirely unwarrantable. If those 
four deaths were due to the interference, Mr. Lister’s mortality 
from preventable causes rises from 6 to io, and the percentage 
equals Mr. Savory’s. In like manner it may well be doubted 
whether Mr. Lister’s confidence in his method did not lead him 
to make three amputations at the hip-joint and one at the shoul- 
der, which another surgeon would not have made, and all of 
which terminated in speedy, almost immediate, death. One of 
them was for “an enormous fibroma,” a benign tumor ; two were 
for injury, and the patients were in collapse at the time of the 
operation ; of the remaining one he says : “I operated for myeloid 
disease of the thigh-bone. The bone looked sound when I 
divided it ; but on microscopic examination there appeared to be 
disease, and I amputated the next day at the hip-joint. The 
patient died in twenty-four hours.” It is true, as he claims, that 
these deaths are not to be taken into account in estimating the 
power of a dressing to prevent blood-poisoning; but if the 
operations were inspired by confidence in the dressing, one death 
certainly, and probably two, are as fairly chargeable to it as if 
they had been caused by pyaemia developed under it As to the 
other two, it may be said that death would have occurred in any 
case ; but that is not a reason for operating, and such interfer- 
ence needlessly compromises our art. 
We turn to Mr. Lister’s cases of injuries to and operations 
upon joints with a feeling of almost unmixed satisfaction and 
pride in his success. The qualification is due to the presence in LISTER'S ANTISEPTIC METHOD. 
7 
this list also of one, possibly of three, operations out of a total of 
twenty, where the interference, although entirely successful, will 
be looked upon by many as of doubtful propriety. In one case a 
ganglion was removed from each wrist, the sheaths of the tendons 
and one wrist joint being freely opened. In another, partial ex- 
cision of the elbow joint was done on account of a badly united 
fracture of the humerus which prevented extension of the fore- 
arm beyond an angle of 120° ; and in a third a transverse fracture 
of the patella was treated by opening the joint and wiring the 
fragments together. Leaving aside this question of the propriety 
of interference which arises in only a few of the cases, the general 
results are excellent. In thirty-one of the thirty-two cases of 
operation or injury the treatment was entirely successful, except 
that in two cases the joint remained stiff, and in one, an ununited 
fracture of the neck of the femur, union did not take place, al- 
though pain was relieved. The solitary failure followed an at- 
tempt to save a badly crushed wrist and hand ; putrefaction 
occurred, and a partial amputation was done. Among the twelve 
cases of injury were two compound fractures communicating with 
the elbow joint, two compound dislocations of the ankle, one 
compound fracture of the femur communicating with the knee 
joint, one punctured wound of the ankle, and two wounds of the 
knee joint, one of them being a large lacerated wound with mud 
ground into the articular cartilage of the femur. In only one of 
these cases is it mentioned that the temperature rose to ioo° F. 
Such a series of good results has, we believe, never before been 
obtained. Mr. Bryant, commenting upon it, says, “ Equally good 
cases might be got out of the ordinary book of the hospital sur- 
geon but that assertion is too indefinite to carry much weight. 
Undoubtedly as good results have been obtained in single cases, 
but until another such integral record is published this one must 
be considered unequalled. 
Space does not permit a prolonged examination of the many 
interesting points connected with this subject, but it may be 
profitable to consider some of them for a moment. In the first 
place, all agree, opponents as well as partisans, in recognizing the 8 
LEWIS A. S TIM SO M. 
gain to surgery from the improved methods in the treatment and 
care of wounds that have been the direct outcome of the intro- 
duction and discussion of this method. Whether the theory and 
practice will win universal acceptance, or share the fate of so 
many surgical novelties, Mr. Lister will still rank among the great 
benefactors of his kind. The importance of keeping wounds 
clean and at rest, of thorough drainage, and of cat-gut ligatures, 
has been impressed upon us in such a way that it is not likely to 
be again forgotten or neglected. We have learned that it is pos- 
sible in great hospitals to habitually obtain speedy union after 
major amputations without increasing the risk of pyaemia by the 
attempt, and to save both life and limb after compound fracture 
with penetration of a joint. Operations which were formerly 
thought to involve too much risk to life are now frequently and 
safely performed; while, on the other hand, this increased se- 
curity has perhaps led to the too ready substitution of the knife 
for equally good non-operative or less severe measures. 
The Lister method, employed in its purity and with all its de- 
tails, has proved itself able to practically abolish pyaemia, hospital 
gangrene and erysipelas from large, ill-conditioned, infected hos- 
pitals, where, previous to its introduction, these diseases attacked 
almost every wounded patient. Volkmann’s experience alone is a 
sufficient proof of this, but it is corroborated by Nussbaum’s in a 
manner which also shows that the previous existence of these 
diseases was not due to the carelessness of the surgeon. Nuss- 
baum had two hospitals, a large public one in Munich and a 
smaller, though still large, private one just outside the city. The 
latter was kept almost free from hospital disease, while the most 
earnest efforts, including the use of various antiseptics and the 
open treatment, failed to purify the former. At last the Lister 
method was introduced, and its introduction was followed by the 
almost total disappearance of septic complications. 
Now, while these facts impose upon a surgeon the moral obli- 
gation to employ the Lister method under similar circumstances, 
or in the place of any personal method which fails to yield an 
equally high percentage of successes, they do not necessarily LISTER'S ANTISEPTIC METHOD. 
9 
prove the correctness of Mr. Lister’s views concerning the origin 
of wound complications, or the agency to which the efficiency of 
his dressing is due. His theory, and in the heat of the discussion 
over the details it appears to have been accepted almost without 
question in England and Germany, is that putrefaction of the 
wound secretions is the one active and efficient cause of the com- 
plications which he seeks to avoid, and that its action depends 
directly upon the absorption of its products, upon their introduc- 
tion into the circulation through the blood-vessels of the raw or 
granulating surface. This putrefaction being set up solely by the 
agency of germs brought to the wound from without, the de- 
tails of the dressing are designed to prevent their deposit upon it 
or to destroy them. It is claimed that the spray destroys all 
germs floating in the air, and therefore it is employed during the 
exposure of the wound at the time of the operation and at the 
subsequent dressings, while the carbolic acid contained in the 
gauze is relied upon for protection during the intermediate 
periods. 
Of the four principal assertions upon which the method rests, 
two lack a demonstration. These are : the agency of putrefac- 
tion in the origin of blood-poisoning, and the power of the spray 
to purify the air. We have elsewhere* given reasons based upon 
experimentation for doubting the possession of this power by the 
spray, and Mr. Lister’s own records show clinically that as good 
results can be obtained without its use as with it. He reports 
thirty-three cases of compound fracture and seven of wounded 
joints ; these wounds were of course received without the protec- 
tion of the spray, and their primary disinfection was sought by 
washing them out with a solution of carbolic acid in water or in 
alcohol, and yet they furnished not a single death by blood poi- 
soning. Their record in this respect is even better than that of 
the operations where the spray was used, and it certainly seems, 
therefore, as if the use of the spray might be dispensed with. 
Mr. Cheyne, indeed, speaks of it as the least important of all the 
precautions, but apparently Mr. Lister does not hold the same 
* Am. Journal of Medical Sciences, January, 1880. 10 
LEWIS A. ST IMSON. 
opinion, for he attributes the occurrence of pyaemia in his fatal 
case of amputation of the breast to the misdirection of the spray, 
apparently during one of the dressings. 
That putrefaction of the wound secretions is the sole or most 
common cause of blood-poisoning is not only not proven, but the 
weight of evidence is, against it. We cannot here do more than 
mention the grounds upon which this statement is based. They 
are of two ]dnds : ist, those which indicate another cause ; 2d, 
those which show the comparative harmlessness of the products 
of putrefaction. 
The contagiousness of erysipelas, its frequent independence of 
an open wound, and its occurrence about slight wounds or those 
that have nearly healed, give it a character entirely distinct from 
pyaemia or septicaemia, and indicate a cause independent of 
putrefaction. 
In like manner, the contagiousness of pyaemia, its comparative 
limitation to crowded surgical wards, its greater frequency in the 
winter, and its relatively tardy appearance, are not compatible 
with the theory of a causative putrefaction ; while its rarity after 
simple wounds, its frequency after those that are associated with 
much laceration and bruising of the tissues, and its more common 
occurrence (other things being equal) in those reduced by habit- 
ual exposure or dissipation, point towards an auto-production of 
the poison dependent upon altered vitality of the tissues involved 
in the injury. 
Another variety of blood-poisoning, characterized by a rapid 
onset and extreme severity, is seen especially in military surgery, 
under physical conditions which are not only unfavorable to the 
origin and spread of a putrefactive process, but are also generally 
considered almost a guarantee against septic complications. Sol- 
diers exhausted by forced marches and dispirited by defeat, ope- 
rated upon in the open air, lying in tents or farm-buildings, often 
at seasons 'when everything is frozen, furnish an enormous per- 
centage of mortality from this cause, and die even before their 
wounds have begun to suppurate. During the siege of Paris the 
mortality after operations was unparalleled ; Nelaton lost 68 out of LISTER'S ANTISEPTIC METHOD. 
11 
70 amputations at the Grand Hotel ; Guerin saw almost every 
amputation at St. Louis end fatally until during the subsequent 
Commune, when he began to envelope his stumps in thick layers 
of cotton and leave them undisturbed for weeks. Under that 
treatment his patients recovered, although they were men and 
women exhausted by the privations of a five months’ siege during 
an exceptionally inclement season, frenzied by drink and passion, 
and suffering from gunshot injuries, and although putrefaction 
went on so actively under the dressings that the odor in the 
wards was very offensive. It must be remembered, too, that at 
that time he made no attempt to get primary union ; he filled the 
wound with cotton and left it to granulate from the bottom. Tts 
whole surface was bathed for weeks in fetid pus, and yet poison- 
ing did not occur. 
It is well known that the danger of post-morte?n inoculation, it- 
self a septicaemic affection, varies with the cause of death, being 
greatest after puerperal or surgical poisoning ; and in these and 
other cases it diminishes with the appearance and progress of pu- 
trefaction. Men with open cuts upon their hands can handle 
putrid matter with comparative impunity, while Sir James Paget 
was poisoned almost fatally by absorption through the unbroken 
skin of his hands of the virus of a puerperal peritonitis. 
Experimentation has shown that to render a rabbit septicaemic 
injections of io, 20, even 30 drops of putrid blood are required, 
and even these are not uniformly successful ; but the desired 
effect can be produced speedily and certainly by the injection of 
the millionth part of a drop of fresh blood taken from another 
animal dying, or just dead, of septicoemia. Moreover, if this lat- 
ter blood is allowed to putrefy, it loses its virulence. 
Vulpian produced by the injection of a small amount of the ex- 
tract of bitter-sweet under the skin of a frog a septicaemia iden- 
tical with that produced by the similar injection of a true septi- 
caemic virus ; and he got a like result from the action of a corrosive 
substance, cyclamine, upon the oesophagus. 
By exciting an acute attack of indigestion, a German patholo- 
gist asserts that he has recently caused pyaemia and putrefaction 12 
LEWIS A. S TIM SON. 
of the discharges of the wound in dogs recovering under antiseptic 
treatment from injuries to their bones ; and although too much 
importance is not to be attached to these isolated and unverified 
experiments, they nevertheless deserve mention. 
Pasteur, whose statements are always to be received with re- 
spect, has described a septic vibrio that is entirely distinct from 
the vibrio of putrefaction, and a vibrio of purulent infection (py- 
aemia) which somewhat resembles the latter. These vibrios are 
found in abundance in ordinary water and in the air in the form 
of corpuscle-germs ; and he claims that the only reason why they 
do not seriously complicate every wound is that the vital action 
of the tissues is unfavorable to their development and multiplica- 
tion. The virulence of the septic vibrio depends greatly upon 
the liquid in which it has been developed, and after having been 
greatly diminished by successive cultivations in one kind of liquid 
it may be so promptly restored by a single cultivation in another 
that -2-oVidh part of a drop will kill, and the blood or serum of the 
animal thus killed has a virulence infinitely greater still. 
Finally, it is a fact daily observed that purulent collections of 
extreme fetidity may exist in the body without giving rise to blood- 
poisoning ; the commonest example, perhaps, is found in abscesses 
of the ischio-rectal fossa. 
It is evident, then, that there is something to be guarded against 
in the treatment of wounds besides putrefaction, and this some- 
thing is in the nature of a specific poison which, there is reason 
to believe, may be generated in the body de novo, and which cer- 
tainly is transmissible. This view harmonizes apparent clinical 
contradictions, and explains the success of different methods of 
treatment as the theory of putrefaction cannot do. There is 
nothing in it incompatible with the belief that putrefaction may 
be positively injurious, either by furnishing a suitable nidus 
for the development of specific germs, or by so modifying adjoin- 
ing tissues whose vitality is already compromised as to turn the 
scale in favor of the occurrence of an actively poisonous process 
therein. According to it the Lister dressing acts by destroying 
specific germs that fall upon the wound during the operation, by L IS TER'S AN TISEP TIC ME THOD. 
13 
preventing the arrival of others subsequently, and by drainage, 
rest, equable pressure, and the absence of ligatures ; and when 
these conditions are realized by other means, equally good results 
may be expected Lewis A. Stimson. ARCHIVES OF MEDICINE FOR 1880. 
A BI-MONTHLY JOURNAL. 
Edited by Dr. E. C. Seguin, in conjunction with Thomas A. McBride, M.D., Lecturer on 
Symptomatology in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, in charge of general medi- 
cine ; Matthew D. Mann, M.D., of Hartford, Ct., Clinical Lecturer in Gynecology in the 
Medical Department of Yale College, in charge of Obstetrics, and Diseases of Women and Chil- 
dren ; and Lewis A. StImson, M.D,, Professor of Pathological Anatomy in the Medical Depart- 
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Prior to entering upon the second year of the Archives existence, the Editor does not desire 
to make any loud promises of things to be done, but prefers simply to point to what has appeared 
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Among Original Articles published in the first five numbers of the Archives, we may cite the 
following as possessed of general interest. 
Supplementary Rectal Alimentation by Dr. A. H. Smith ; The Self-limitation of Phthisis by 
Dr. Austin Flint, Sr. ; Fibroids of the Uterus by Dr. T. G. Thomas ; Phthisis Pulmonalis by 
Dr. J. R. Teaming ; The Pathological Anatomy of Tetanus by Dr. R. W. Amidon ; A Contribu- 
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Psycho-physiological Training of an Idiotic Hand by Dr. Edward Seguin ; and Mr. Delafield’s 
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The five Editorial Articles have treated of the following subjects : The Present Aspect 
of the Question of Tetanoid Paraplegia by the Editor ; The Utility of the Sphygmograph in 
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In the Department for Original Observations twenty valuable cases have been recorded, several 
of which might have formed the basis of original articles. 
COLLABORATORS. 
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