This was a controversial stance to take in a world that thought that infection was caused by bad air and essentially unavoidable. Medical students were known for being fancy dressers and also by the filthiness of their shirts.Into this world stepped Joseph Lister who, influenced by the work of Louis Pasteur, began to work with the idea of keeping wounds clean and free of contamination. Unfortunately, this new ability did not increase the chances of survival, since infection was still an unsurmountable danger in a world where surgeons would move directly from the autopsy table to the operating table to examining patients in hospital beds, all without changing their clothes or even washing their hands. The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris begins with the first uses of ether, which allowed surgeons to operate on more complex cases. One story has a surgeon completing an amputation in a mere 28 seconds, although he also managed to remove a testicle, three of his assistant's fingers and slice open a bystander's coat in the process. Without anesthesia, surgery was the last resort of those in terrible pain and, indeed, most would die either from the surgery or soon afterwards from infection.
Read moreīack in the olden days, surgeons were valued not by their skill with a knife, but by their speed. 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.Įerie 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.
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.įitzharris 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. 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. 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. 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. "Warning: She spares no detail!" -Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Book PrizeĪ Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers WeeklyĪ Best History Book of 2017, The Guardian Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing
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