Robert Liston’s glimmer of hope

The opening picture of An Appointment at the House of Death (December) is somewhat misleading. Rather than exemplifying the undoubted horrors of mid-19th-century surgery, it actually depicts a glimmer of hope – the first anaesthetic in England. On 21 December 1846, at University College Hospital, Robert Liston performed a leg amputation on a butler named Frederick Churchill who had been administered ether. To the right of the original picture, but not appearing in your printed version, the glass apparatus used to provide the vapour is clearly seen. It may also be noted in the picture that the patient appears to be unconscious – or at least not recoiling in horror.

Ether anaesthesia had first been demonstrated in Boston on 16 October; the news crossed the Atlantic remarkably quickly. Liston’s laconic response was “this Yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow”.

That Liston officiated at much darker moments is not disputed. In his book The Alarming History of Medicine, Richard Gordon cites a surgery of his in which the patient died, the assistant received a cut and died of septicaemia, and a horrified onlooker died of a heart attack. It was the only surgery in history, Gordon remarked, with a 300 per cent mortality rate. Simon J Lucy, Winnipeg

We reward the Letter of the Month writer with our ‘History Choice’ book of the month. This issue, it’s Franklin D Roosevelt: A Political Life by Robert Dallek. Read the review on page 71

A glass inhaler used to provide the ether that rendered patients unconscious during operations in the mid-19th century