enthusiasts have been either contradicted or so materially modified by subsequent observations that the question still remains in the domain of mere speculation." Referring to the opportunities for "charlatanism" and for honest mistake in this field, he added, "nevertheless I certainly regard the microscopical forms which exist in the atmosphere and their possible effect on man as a proper matter for scientific study, and by way of contributing my mite to the difficult subject * * * I have collected the organic forms from a quantity of air of a stable in this city where there are a number of sick horses, and submitted them to the highest power of the microscope, without finding any which are not usually encountered when no epidemic is prevailing * * *."29[1]
His opinion had undergone little change when, 7 years later, in part II of volume I of the "Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion," he used with approval the derisive term "bacteriafanatics" and, speaking of the persistence of the "general hypothesis that bacteria are in some way disease-producers," said that Virchow's "splendid rhetoric has lent plausibility to arguments which appeal almost as much to faith as to reason." Dr. Woodward was well aware of the presence of inconceivable numbers of bacteria, but he was doubtful of the disease-producing effects of what he referred to, somewhat slightingly, as "those convenient bacteria which have played so conspicuous a part in modern pathological speculation." 30[2]
Ironically, the expressions of scientific skepticism on the part of Dr. Wood-ward were published 2 years after Capt. A. C. Girard, stationed at Fort Randall, Dakota Territory, had reported enthusiastically on the results of Joseph Lister's technique in antiseptic surgery, which he had observed on a trip to Europe. Captain Girard was willing to "leave to other pens the task of elucidating" the nature of bacteria and how they acted upon the body, but he stoutly maintained "the indisputable fact that there are germs or ferments in the atmosphere which will produce putrefaction in wounds, and that by preventing their ingress we can in most cases avert the complications which cause the greatest fatality in surgery * * *. This is the key to Lister's system." Captain Girard's report was published to the Medical Corps in Circular Orders No. 3, Surgeon General's Office, 20 August 1877, but, perhaps because the report and the Lister system dealt with surgery while Dr. Woodward was concerned with medicine, neither the Girard report nor Lister himself is mentioned in the 1879 volume of the History.
