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December 16, 2018 - January 1, 2019
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,
Liston was skeptical, though not enough to pass up an opportunity to try something new in the operating theater.
Many surgeons in the first decades of the nineteenth century didn’t attend university. Some were even illiterate.
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.
He knew that for thousands of years, the ever-looming threat of infection had restricted the extent of a surgeon’s reach.
Surviving the operation was one thing. Making a full recovery was another. As it
With Robert Liston’s ether triumph, Lister had just witnessed the elimination of the first of the two major obstacles to successful surgery—that it could now be performed without inflicting pain.
“forced the dead human body to disclose its secrets for the benefit of the living.”
Little by little, students began to view the bodies set before them not as people but as objects. This ability to divorce oneself emotionally came to characterize the mind-set of the medical community.
“There cannot always be fresh fields of conquest by the knife; there must be portions of the human frame that will ever remain sacred from its intrusions, at least in the surgeon’s hands. That we have already, if not quite, reached these final limits, there can be little question. The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will be forever shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.”
lives to the surgeon who, when faced with the terrifying prospect of performing his first major operation entirely alone, acted quickly and decisively. It was the first of many surgical triumphs that Lister could call his own.
In 1884, the American physician William Pancoast injected sperm from his “best-looking” student into an anesthetized woman—without her knowledge—whose husband had been deemed infertile. Nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby. Pancoast eventually told her husband what he had done, but the two men decided to spare the woman the truth. Pancoast’s experiment remained a secret for twenty-five years. After his death in 1909, the donor—a man ironically named Dr. Addison Davis Hard—confessed to the underhanded deed in a letter to Medical World.)
“Every patient, even the most degraded, should be treated with the same care and regard as though he were the Prince of Wales himself.”
“All that is locally wrong may be removed,” he wrote, “but something remains, or, after a time, is renewed, and similar disease reappears and, in some form or degree, is usually worse than the first, and always tending towards
“Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.”
For instance, William W. Keen, a pioneer in neurological surgery, adopted antisepsis a month after the International Medical Congress. He later recounted, “For me it changed surgery from Purgatory to Paradise,” adding that he would never abandon Lister’s system.
As the years passed, there was a gradual shift in medical procedure from antisepsis (germ killing) to asepsis (germ-free practices).
No longer lauded for their quick hand with a knife, they were revered for being careful, methodical, and precise.
Hector Cameron, Lister’s former student and assistant, later said of him, “We knew we were in contact with Genius. We felt we were helping in the making of History and that all things were becoming new.” What was once impossible was now achievable. What was once inconceivable could now be imagined. The future of medicine suddenly seemed limitless.
