“As he neared the end of his life, Lister expressed the desire that if his story was ever told, it would be done through his scientific achievements alone,” Fitzharris notes, respecting his wish and fulfilling it in the context of a remarkable life and time. She infuses her thoughtful and finely crafted examination of this revolution with the same sense of wonder and compassion Lister himself brought to his patients, colleagues, and students. “Lister’s methods transformed surgery from a butchering art to a modern science, one where newly tried and tested methodologies trumped hackneyed practices,” Fitzharris writes. The medical community resisted Lister’s procedures, but his successful treatment of Queen Victoria boosted his reputation and techniques-winning converts first in Scotland, then America, and finally London. Lister, whose Quaker father introduced him to the wonders of the microscope, became an evangelist for the germ theory of disease and the sterilization of both surgical instruments and doctors’ hands. This was a radical approach inspired by French microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur’s discovery of bacteria. She conjures up early operating theatersno place for the squeamishand surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded. British science writer Fitzharris slices into medical history with this excellent biography of Joseph Lister, the 19th-century “hero of surgery.” Lister championed the destruction of microorganisms in surgical wounds, thus preventing deadly postoperative infections. In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 18.
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