[Leer] Kindle The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform
the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
By Lindsey Fitzharris
The gripping story of how Joseph Lister's antiseptic method changed medicine
foreverIn 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, working before
anesthesia, who 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
