Winner, 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing
Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize
A Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly
A Best History Book of 2017, The Guardian
"Warning: She spares no detail!" --Erik Larson, bestselling author of
Dead Wake
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 1860
and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters--no place for the
squeamish--and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for
their speed and brute strength. These pioneers knew that the aftermath
of surgery was often more dangerous than patients' afflictions, and they
were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates
stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn't have been more
hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy
Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the riddle and
change the course of history.
Fitzharris dramatically reconstructs Lister's career path to his
audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be
countered by a sterilizing agent applied to wounds. She introduces us to
Lister's contemporaries--some of them brilliant, some outright
criminal--and leads us through the grimy schools and squalid hospitals
where they learned their art, the dead houses where they studied, and
the cemeteries they ransacked for cadavers.
Eerie and illuminating, The Butchering Art celebrates the triumph of a
visionary surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us
into the modern world.
