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

by Lindsey Fitzharris

As it turned out, the two decades immediately following the popularization of anesthesia saw surgical outcomes worsen. With their newfound confidence about operating without inflicting pain, surgeons became ever more willing to take up the knife, driving up the incidences of postoperative infection and shock. Operating theaters became filthier than ever as the number of surgeries increased. Surgeons still lacking an understanding of the causes of infection would operate on multiple patients in succession using the same unwashed instruments on each occasion.

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.

The official report concluded that had Potter eaten breakfast before rushing into the dissection room, he might have lived, because a full stomach would have aided the absorption of the toxic substances that had entered his body when dissecting Leach. In an era that knew nothing of germs, this explanation seemed entirely plausible.

the notorious Newgate Prison, which had once held captive such famous personalities as Daniel Defoe, Captain Kidd, and William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania.

Founding Pennsylvania is definitely a serious crime.

(Syphilis was so common that “no nose clubs” sprang up all over London. One newspaper reported that “an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood.” The man, who assumed the alias of Mr. Crampton for these clandestine parties, entertained his noseless friends every month for a year until his death, at which time the group “unhappily dissolved.”)

Lister’s colleague Morton didn’t just find fault with his methods. He also didn’t accept the premise that germs were to blame for putrefaction. Morton characterized Lister’s published research as fearmongering. “Nature is here regarded as some murderous hag,” he wrote, “whose fiendish machinations must be counteracted. She must be entrapped into good behavior, she is no longer to be trusted.”

was difficult for many surgeons at the height of their careers to face the fact that for the past fifteen or twenty years they might have been inadvertently killing patients by allowing wounds to become infected with tiny, invisible creatures.

As one of Lister’s assistants astutely observed: “A new and great scientific discovery is always apt to leave in its trail many casualties among the reputations of those who have been champions of an older method. It is hard for them to forgive the man whose work has rendered their own of no account.”

At the end of his career, Lister was often followed by a procession of solemn, reverential students, the first of whom bore aloft the sacred carbolic spray as a talisman of their mentor’s extraordinary accomplishments. They came from all over the world to study under the great surgeon: from Paris, Vienna, Rome, and New York. And they took back with them his ideas, his methods, and his unshakable conviction that with the correct application of meticulous and hard-won techniques surgery could one day save far more lives than it inadvertently ended.