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October 16, 2025
At a time when surgeons believed pus was a natural part of the healing process rather than a sinister sign of sepsis, most deaths were due to postoperative infections. Operating theaters were gateways to death. It was safer to have an operation at home than in a hospital, where mortality rates were three to five times higher than they were in domestic settings.
they acted as gatekeepers for their profession, admitting only men whom they believed had good breeding and high moral standing.
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.
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 French, in particular, were making discoveries at an extraordinary pace with the aid of the scientific instrument, owing partly to the rise of large hospitals in Paris during the French Revolution. By 1788, there were 20,341 patients residing in forty-eight different hospitals around the city: an unprecedented number unmatched anywhere else in the world.
Even those who did not live immediately adjacent to an anatomy school carried with them reminders of their gruesome activities, because neither gloves nor other forms of protective gear were worn inside the dissection room. Indeed, it was not uncommon to see a medical student with shreds of flesh, gut, or brains stuck to his clothing after his lessons were over.
Domestic abuse was not a rarity in Victorian England. Wife-beating was a national pastime, and women like Julia were often treated like property by their husbands.
Between 1800 and 1850, there were more than two hundred recorded cases of wife sales in England. Undoubtedly, there were more that went unreported.
In 1845, King’s College Hospital treated all but 1,160 of the 17,093 people who came through its doors as outpatients.
“Incurables”—people with cancer or tuberculosis, for instance—were turned away, as were people with venereal infections.
During the working week, Lister encountered many cases of injury and illness brought on by poor living and working conditions.
