Book of the week The Butchering Art
by Lindsey Fitzharris Allen Lane 304pp £16.99 The Week Bookshop £14.99
In this “scintillating and shocking” book, Lindsey Fitzharris charts the transformation of Victorian surgery from a “filthy business fraught with hidden dangers” into a “science that could reliably save lives”, said Bee Wilson in The Sunday Times. Early 19th century surgeons “were more like butchers than doctors”. They dressed in gowns that were often “stiff with dried blood”, boasted of being able to hack off patients’ limbs in minutes, and operated in theatres that stank of “urine, vomit, rats and worse”. Surgery was as likely to kill as cure, with post-amputation death rates often approaching 50% – usually the result of surgical wounds becoming infected. The man who did most to remedy this situation – and the hero of Fitzharris’s biography-cum-social history – was a “muttonchopped” Quaker named Joseph Lister. In the 1860s and 1870s, Lister became the first doctor to use antiseptics in surgery – a breakthrough that “saved countless lives”.
Mild-mannered, courteous and affected by a stammer, Lister was an “unlikely hero”, said Wendy Moore in The Guardian. Puzzled as to why “wound infection after surgery was so common”, he initially surmised that the problem was “something in the air”. The “penny dropped” when he learnt of Louis Pasteur’s germ theory, which identified “microscopic objects” – or bacteria – as the culprits. Lister discovered that carbolic acid could kill germs before they spread, without unduly harming patients. Deploying a “meticulous system” that involved the “washing of hands, instruments and site of an operation with carbolic acid mixed with linseed oil”, he dramatically cut post-operative death rates at his hospital, the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. And although at first the medical profession “rose in condemnation of his methods”, eventually his “system prevailed”.
Remarkable as Lister’s story is, this is less a serious biography than a “breezy romp”, said Melanie Reid in The Times. The author is an “internet blogger [with a PHD] whose speciality is the macabre”, and it shows in some of the accounts she includes – of “maggots thriving” in hospital sheets and “various tales of faces and penises rotting off”. Such passages “made me come over all faint”. While The Butchering Art is “not for the fainthearted”, it is also “illuminating” and “thoroughly enjoyable”, said Nicola Davis in The Observer. Exploring Lister’s life with “almost surgical precision”, Fitzharris “paints a compelling portrait of a man of conviction, humour and, above all, humanity”.