Lister not only became Syme’s right-hand man, he married his daughter, Agnes. After moving to Scotland, he was taken under the wing of James Syme, known as “the Napoleon of surgery” for his fearlessness in the operating theatre. Thankfully, for Lister and for us, the reluctant surgeon persevered. He told his father: “I am by disposition very averse to quarrelling.” Dogged by depression, he almost gave up surgery at one point. In a professional culture riven by feuds, when doctors stubbornly championed their signature methods regardless of scientific evidence, Lister was a misfit. Born to Quaker parents, he was mild-mannered, courteous and anxious about his stammer – the antithesis of the egotistical surgeons who made their names in early Victorian Britain. Entering the unpromising field of surgery as a student in 1844, Lister makes an unlikely hero. Lindsey Fitzharris brings this squalid, grisly, disease-filled scene to gloriously pulsating, technicoloured life in her biography of the pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister. Post-operative infection was so endemic in hospital wards it was named “hospitalism” and anyone who could afford to be treated at home avoided hospital admission at all costs. The advent of anaesthesia only encouraged surgeons: their ability to perform longer, more invasive surgery meant filthy knives and fingers spread more infection, so that mortality rates in hospitals actually rose during the mid-1800s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |