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

by Lindsey Fitzharris

Mesmerism—named after the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer, who invented the hypnotic technique in the 1770s—had also failed to be accepted into mainstream medical practice in the eighteenth century.

when the German botanist and chemist Valerius Cordus created a revolutionary formula that involved adding sulfuric acid to ethyl alcohol. His contemporary Paracelsus experimented with ether on chickens, noting that when the birds drank the liquid, they would undergo prolonged sleep and awake unharmed.

Liston’s speed was both a gift and a curse. Once, he accidentally sliced off a patient’s testicle along with the leg he was amputating. His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant’s fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator’s coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.

Liston—who reportedly had the fastest knife in the West End—achieved all this in just under sixty seconds.

The surgeon was very much viewed as a manual laborer who used his hands to make his living, much like a key cutter or plumber today. Nothing better demonstrated the inferiority of surgeons than their relative poverty. Before 1848, no major hospital had a salaried surgeon on its staff, and most surgeons (with the exception of a notable few) made very little money from their private practices.

The dagger’s point, the last two inches of which were razor-sharp, was created to cut through the skin, thick muscles, tendons, and tissues of the thigh with a single slice. It is little wonder that for Jack the Ripper, the “Liston knife” was the weapon of choice for the gutting of victims during his killing spree in 1888.

The Pickwick Papers,

“Naturopathy”—

The best that can be said about Victorian hospitals is that they were a slight improvement over their Georgian predecessors. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement when one considers that a hospital’s “Chief Bug-Catcher”—whose job it was to rid the mattresses of lice—was paid more than its surgeons.

avocation.”

Harvey Leach,

sacral

“a most melancholy and disheartening instance of brilliant talent and promise blighted in the blood.”

“St. Anthony’s Fire”

were the root of sickness.)

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).

suppuration

pythogenesis,

(That the name of a disease like malaria derives from the Italian words mala, or “bad,” and aria, or “air,”

mi...

virulence,

phthisis,

velocipedes,

“spending a penny.”

humours

Charlotte Brontë wrote of the Great Exhibition, “It is a wonderful place—vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created, you find there.”

camera lucida—

reproduction

virulent

“phagedenic” ulcer, the latter deriving from Greek and meaning “to eat away.”

preternatural

deleterious

pultaceous

debrided

miasma

slough

cravat

eschewed

excised

blanched.

maverick

meted

offal

a poetic twist of fate,

So

ordnance

evinced

acupressure

rapprochement.

boon