THE BUTCHERING ART

JOSEPH LISTER’S QUEST TO TRANSFORM THE GRISLY WORLD OF VICTORIAN MEDICINE

Allen Lane, 286pp, £16.99, Oldie price £11.21 inc p&p

‘This is one book you can judge by its title – and it’s not for the squeamish,’ warned Dean Jobb in the Scotsman. Lindsey Fitzharris, medical historian and blogger, has written a biography of Victorian surgeon Joseph Lister, who discovered that germs led to infections that could be treated with antiseptics, thereby transforming surgery forever. At the time, described Wendy Moore in the Guardian, ‘skilled surgeons could amputate a leg in under 30 seconds but prided themselves on never washing their hands and wore aprons so stiffened with dried blood they could stand up on their own’. ‘Less sensitive students were known to duel with severed legs and arms’ was the choice snippet offered up to us by Jennifer Senior in the New York Times. Fitzharris, Moore went on, ‘brings this squalid, grisly, disease-filled scene to gloriously

‘Less sensitive students were known to duel with severed legs and arms’

pulsating, technicoloured life’. Enter Lister, our mild-mannered reluctant hero, who doggedly pursues his theory in the face of concerted opposition.

‘While some refused to believe in germs they could not see,’ wrote Moore, ‘others denounced his theory as worthless and even dangerous.’ ‘Yet Lister’s ideas eventually prevailed,’ Senior reminded us, adding that ‘The fact that he operated on Queen Victoria for an abscess in her armpit probably helped.’ Senior queried why Lister got ‘all the credit for making the connection between hygiene and infection’ when others did not – ‘most famously the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis’, who died raving in an asylum for his beliefs. ‘Lister, meanwhile,’ huffed Senior, ‘lived to a ripe old age and got a mouthwash named after him.’