The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

by Lindsey Fitzharris

On March 16, 1867, the first installment of a five-part article titled “On a New Method of Treating Compound Fracture, Abscess, etc., with Observations on the Conditions of Suppuration” appeared in print. The other four followed in the coming weeks and months. In these articles, Lister demonstrated that he had instituted a system based on Louis Pasteur’s highly contested view that putrefaction was caused by germs in the air. He wrote that the “minute particles suspended in [the air], which are the germs of various low forms of life, long since revealed by the microscope, and regarded as merely accidental concomitants of putrescence,” had now been shown by Pasteur to be its “essential cause.” It was necessary to “dress the wound with some material capable of killing these septic germs.” Lister’s system involved using the antiseptic properties of carbolic acid in order to prevent germs from entering wounds, as well as destroying those that had already invaded the body.