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

by Lindsey Fitzharris

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.

In 1884, the American physician William Pancoast injected sperm from his “best-looking” student into an anesthetized woman—without her knowledge—whose husband had been deemed infertile.