Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister introduced antiseptic surgery and cut death rates from amputation by two thirds. Born in Essex in 1827 into a Quaker family — his father was a wine merchant and an amateur microscopist who developed the achromatic lens that made the modern microscope possible — he studied at University College London, one of the few institutions open to non-Anglicans. He moved to Edinburgh under James Syme, whose daughter he married, and became professor of surgery at Glasgow in 1860. The problem was that roughly half of amputation patients died afterwards of what surgeons called hospital gangrene or ward fever, and which was assumed to be caused by bad air. Wounds were expected to suppurate, and surgeons operated in blood-stiffened frock coats and did not wash their hands. Lister read Pasteur's work on fermentation in 1865 and drew the connection: if putrefaction is caused by microorganisms rather than air itself, wounds could be protected by killing them. He chose carbolic acid, which had been used to treat sewage in Carlisle. He dressed wounds with it, soaked instruments and ligatures in it, washed his hands in it, and later sprayed it into the operating field. Mortality in his male accident ward fell from about forty-five per cent to fifteen over four years. The profession resisted for a decade, partly because the germ theory was unfamiliar and partly because the method required tedious discipline. Germany and America adopted it before Britain. He introduced sterile catgut ligatures and rubber drains, and Listerine was named after him without his involvement. He died in 1912.

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