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

by Lindsey Fitzharris

The burgeoning awareness of microbes intensified the Victorian public’s preoccupation with cleanliness, and a new generation of carbolic acid cleaning and personal hygiene products flooded onto the market. Perhaps the most famous of these was Listerine, invented by Dr. Joseph Joshua Lawrence in 1879. Lawrence had attended Lister’s lecture in Philadelphia, which inspired him to begin manufacturing his own antiseptic concoction in the back of an old cigar factory in St. Louis shortly thereafter. Lawrence’s formula contained thymol (derived from phenol) in addition to eucalyptol and menthol. It also had an alcohol concentration of 27 percent. Nothing would have come of Listerine had the entrepreneurial pharmacist Jordan Wheat Lambert not recognized its potential when he met Lawrence in 1881. Lambert bought the rights to the product and its formula from the good doctor and began marketing it as an antiseptic with multiple uses, including as a dandruff treatment, a floor cleaner, and even a cure for gonorrhea. In 1895, Lambert promoted Listerine to the dental profession as an oral antiseptic, a use for which it has achieved immortality. Other products that sprang up in the wake of the antiseptic mania included carbolic soap, carbolic general disinfectants (often simply neat phenol sold in bottles with instructions printed on them), and carbolic tooth powder. Calvert’s Carbolic Tooth Paste became a household favorite and even attracted the patronage of Queen Victoria. In the Uni...