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

by Lindsey Fitzharris

When Lister saw filmy discharge seeping through a patient’s dressings one day in 1852, this must have been on his mind. As he peeled back the damp bandages, he was met with a powerful odor emanating from a rotting, ulcerating wound. An epidemic of hospital gangrene soon swept Erichsen’s wards as a result of this single patient. Lister was quickly put in charge of carrying out treatment on the infected—a task that reflects just how far he had come in his residency to be trusted with such important work. At the height of the outbreak, Lister observed something peculiar. He routinely scraped away the brown pultaceous slough from patients’ infected wounds while they were anesthetized. He then applied mercury pernitrate, a highly caustic and toxic solution, to them. Afterward, he recorded in his notebook: “As a rule … a perfectly healthy granulating sore was disclosed which healed kindly under ordinary dressings.”