Special article: A retrospective on infection control- Part 2: twentieth century-the flame burns

摘要

In Part 1 of this two-part series, I reviewed the beginnings of what is now called infection control by highlighting the contributions of four nine- teenth century contemporaries: Holmes, Semmel- wies, Nightingale, and Lister. During the net cen- tury their respective contributions-the recogni- tion of person-to-person spread of contagion, effectiveness of hand hygiene, sanitary reform and use of statistics and clinical epidemiology, and antiseptic surgery-became integrated into prac- tice. But it was more than a century before the specialty known as infection control was established.