The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
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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, where mortality rates were three to five times higher than they were in domestic settings.
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It was not uncommon during this period for physicians to prescribe treatment without first performing a physical examination. Indeed, some dispensed medical advice through letters alone, never laying eyes on the patient in question.
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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.
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In Squire’s hand was an apparatus that looked like an Arabian hookah made of glass with a rubber tube and bell-shaped mask. The device had been fashioned by Squire’s uncle, a pharmacist in London, and used by the dental surgeon James Robinson to extract a tooth just two days prior. It looked foreign to those in the audience.
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The term “etherization” was coined, and its use in surgery was celebrated in newspapers around the country.
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Nothing better demonstrated the inferiority of surgeons than their relative poverty. Before 1848, no major hospital had a salaried surgeon on its staff, and most surgeons (with the exception of a notable few) made very little money from their private practices.
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Within the space of a hundred years, London’s population soared from one million to just over six million inhabitants in the nineteenth century.
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Lister would credit his broad background for his ability to connect scientific theories to medical practice.
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The dagger’s point, the last two inches of which were razor-sharp, was created to cut through the skin, thick muscles, tendons, and tissues of the thigh with a single slice. It is little wonder that for Jack the Ripper, the “Liston knife” was the weapon of choice for the gutting of victims during his killing spree in 1888.
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Many had decorative etchings and were stored in velvet cases, which bore bloodstains from past operations.
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large percentage of these people would succumb to their infirmities. Because they were often poor, their bodies went unclaimed and fell into the hands of anatomists like Marie François Xavier Bichat, who reportedly carved up no fewer than six hundred bodies in the winter of 1801–1802.
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high. Between 1843 and 1859, forty-one young men died after contracting fatal infections at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, before ever qualifying as doctors.
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“Naturopathy”—the treatment of disease through the promotion of the body’s own healing powers—also played a significant role in Victorian medicine.
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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.
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The surgeon James Y. Simpson remarked as late as 1869 that a “soldier has more chance of survival on the field of Waterloo than a man who goes into hospital.”
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most hospitals were disastrously understaffed. In 1825, visitors to St. George’s Hospital discovered mushrooms and maggots thriving in the damp, dirty sheets of a patient recovering from a compound fracture.
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pyemia, a form of septicemia that results in the development of widespread abscesses all over the body
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London for hosting “octaves”—dinners of eight courses for eight people served at eight o’clock.
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erysipelas, an acute skin infection sometimes referred to as “St. Anthony’s Fire” because it turns the skin bright red and shiny.
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Erysipelas was one of four major infections that plagued hospitals in the nineteenth century. The other three were hospital gangrene (ulcers that lead to decay of flesh, muscle, and bone), septicemia (blood poisoning), and pyemia (development of pus-filled abscesses).
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Between 1800 and 1850, there were more than two hundred recorded cases of wife sales in England. Undoubtedly, there were more that went unreported.