The gripping story of how Joseph Lister's antiseptic method changed
medicine forever
In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the
shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound
transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters - no place for
the squeamish - and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded
for their speed and brute strength. These medical pioneers knew that the
aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than their 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
deadly riddle and change the course of history.
Fitzharris dramatically recounts Lister's discoveries in gripping
detail, culminating in his audacious claim that germs were the source of
all infection - and could be countered by antiseptics. Focusing on the
tumultuous period from 1850 to 1875, she introduces us to Lister and his
contemporaries - some of them brilliant, some outright criminal - and
takes us through the grimy medical schools and dreary hospitals where
they learned their art, the deadhouses where they studied anatomy, and
the graveyards they occasionally 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.
