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

by Lindsey Fitzharris

The most publicly damning critique came from Thomas Nunneley, an English surgeon in Leeds who took great pride in having not permitted a single patient of his to be treated with carbolic acid. In his address to the British Medical Association in 1869, he said that Lister’s antiseptic system was based on “unsupported fancies, which have little other existence than what is found in the imagination of those who believe in them.” He thought that Lister’s advocacy of the germ theory was preposterous: “This speculation of organic germs is, I fear, far more than an innocent fallacy,” he told conference attendees, among them James Y. Simpson. “It is a positive injury,” he continued, “for teaching … that those desperate consequences which so often follow wounds result from one cause alone, and are to be prevented by attending to it alone … leads to the ignoring of those many and often complicated causes.” In his response to Nunneley, Lister could barely disguise his disgust: “That he should dogmatically oppose a treatment which he so little understands; and which, by his own admission, he has never tried, is a matter of small moment.”