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.
