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

by Lindsey Fitzharris

Erysipelas was one of four major infections that plagued hospitals in the nineteenth century. The other three were hospital gangrene (ulcers that lead to decay of flesh, muscle, and bone), septicemia (blood poisoning), and pyemia (development of pus-filled abscesses). Any one of these conditions could prove fatal depending on a wide range of factors, not least the age and general health of the sufferer. The increase in infection and suppuration brought on by “the big four” later became known as hospitalism, which the medical community increasingly blamed on the establishment of large urban hospitals wherein patients found themselves in close contact with one another. Although the construction of these buildings met the needs of a rapidly growing population, many doctors believed that hospitals counteracted surgical advancements, because a majority of patients died of infections they would not otherwise have contracted had they not been admitted in the first place. Indeed, one contemporary argued that the medical community could not hope for “progress in the public practice of the healing art, till our system of hospitalism is more or less changed and revolutionized.” The problem was that no one knew exactly how infectious diseases were transmitted.