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

by Lindsey Fitzharris

Potter carefully sliced his way deeper into the corpse, pausing to make meticulous notes as he did so. Suddenly his lancet slipped, causing him to puncture the knuckle of his forefinger. Unaware of the precarious situation he now found himself in, Potter continued with the anatomization. Days later, the young surgeon began to develop pyemia, a form of septicemia that results in the development of widespread abscesses all over the body—a condition doubtless brought on by his exposure to Leach’s bacteria-riddled corpse. The infection traveled up his arm, eventually spreading all over his body. Over the next three weeks, five doctors—including Robert Liston—attended Potter’s bedside, purportedly draining three pints of pus from his sacral region and an additional two pints from his chest, before the young man finally died. The official report concluded that had Potter eaten breakfast before rushing into the dissection room, he might have lived, because a full stomach would have aided the absorption of the toxic substances that had entered his body when dissecting Leach. In an era that knew nothing of germs, this explanation seemed entirely plausible.