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

by Lindsey Fitzharris

(That the name of a disease like malaria derives from the Italian words mala, or “bad,” and aria, or “air,” suggests that people believed the disease had miasmic origins.)

Between 1800 and 1850, there were more than two hundred recorded cases of wife sales in England. Undoubtedly, there were more that went unreported.

Flight was one of the few options available to Julia in 1851, when a woman’s initiation of divorce proceedings was contingent on the husband’s committing both adultery and assault (the same was not true for the husband).

Hey what the fuck

Men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things. —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

“Nullius jurare in verba magistri” (Swear allegiance to no master).

Only life begets life.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. —JOHN LOCKE

He ended his letter with an earnest, almost poetic wish: “May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore.”

SO FAR THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY seemed reluctant to accept the idea that microscopic organisms caused disease.

CLOWNS! BUFFOONS!

Back in the classroom, he quipped to his students, “Gentlemen, I am the only man who has ever stuck a knife into the Queen!”