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

by Lindsey Fitzharris

The Scottish surgeon John Bell wrote about the horror of hospital gangrene after treating numerous patients who had died from it. In the first stage, “the wound swells, the skin retracts … the cellular membrane is melted down into a foetid mucus, and the fascia is exposed.” As the disease progresses, the wound enlarges and the skin is eaten away, exposing the deep layer of muscles and bone. The patient goes into shock and begins experiencing intense nausea and diarrhea as the body tries to expel the poison from within. The pain is excruciating, and alas, delirium is rare. The patient remains conscious throughout the whole miserable ordeal. Bell wrote, “The cries of the sufferers are the same in the night as in the day-time; they are exhausted in the course of a week and die: or if they survive, and the ulcers continue to eat down and disjoin the muscles, the great vessels are at last exposed and eroded, and they bleed to death.”