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

by Lindsey Fitzharris

At the time of Lister’s appointment, nursing was not a calling that required skill or training, nor did it command much respect. Educated, well-to-do women didn’t dare enter a profession that would expose them to the intimate workings of the male body or leave them alone and unsupervised with men. Florence Nightingale—the woman who would later revolutionize nursing—had not yet fully developed the protocols of cleanliness for which she would become celebrated. Furthermore, it would be another nine years before the founding of the International Red Cross, which would be instrumental in training nurses in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As a result of the profession’s low recruitment standards, many of the nurses with whom Lister worked were a motley crew. Nightingale herself once visited the Royal Infirmary and found it to be a “lawless” place when it came to managing the nursing staff. She explained that it was the senior house surgeon’s duty to have the “drunken night nurses carried in on stretchers every night.” This unpleasant task would have fallen to Lister in his first year working under Syme. Indeed, there was a woman who used the hospital beds to sleep off her frequent hangovers and whom Lister had to reprimand on several occasions.