'Following Joseph Lister, German surgeons, unlike their French colleagues, used carbolic acid spray to sterilise their tools and operating areas. French surgeons did insist on ‘hygiene’, but by this they meant the provision of adequate bedding and the maintenance of medical supplies, not sterilisation. Death rates for amputations on the French side reached 75 per cent (including toes and fingers) – a shocking figure, given that by 1870 the use of Lister’s techniques in peacetime amputations had resulted in a drop from 50 per cent to 15 per cent.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n18/christopher-clark/predicamental
@cyrilpedia Cleanliness has never been a French virtue. I had a professor in college who liked to say: “You can tell where Spain ends and France begins by the smell.” On a less biased and francophobic note, an Ecuadorian friend once visited Paris on vacation. When she came back I asked her what it had been like, and she replied: “It's full of rats.”
