The Butchering Art

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine  by Lindsey Fitzharris, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. 

Lister’s Background

Both Joseph Lister and his father,  Joseph Jackson Lister, were Quakers. Joseph Lister’s father, Joseph Jackson Lister, figured out a way to compensate for chromatic aberration in the lenses of microscopes. Chromatic aberration is the fact that glass bends light at different angles depending on the color (wavelength). Joseph Lister spent many years working as a surgeon in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. 

Germ Theory of Disease

Doctors during Joseph Lister’s time believed in spontaneous generation of life and that smelly air caused disease. Louis Pasteur disproved the theory of spontaneous generation and developed the germ theory of disease. Joseph Lister was a believer in Pasteur’s theory. Many of his contemporaries were not. 

Carbolic Acid

Lister experimented with several disinfectants before settling on carbolic acid (phenol). Lister put carbolic acid on wounds, the surgeon’s hands and on the surgical instruments. Lister introduced his antisepsis system in 1967. Others had used carbolic acid for antisepsis before Lister, but Listers deserves most of the credit because (a) he did more experiments showing how it worked, (b) he better understood the relationship of antisepsis to Louie Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, and (c) he did more to publicize the use of carbolic acid. Joseph Lister received much push back from other doctors  in London and the U.S.A.

Anesthesia

Anesthesia had been invented twenty years before Lester discovered the use of carbolic acid as a disinfectant. Before anesthesia, surgeons operated quickly to minimize the time patients were in pain.