Who is Joseph Lister? The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris

I'm Lindsay Fitzharris and I'm a medical historian, although I like to call myself a storyteller. I've always been interested in the stories of the past, even as a little girl I used to drag my grandmother from cemetery to cemetery hunting ghosts. And I think a lot of people thought that I was obsessed with death from a young age, which might be true, but I kind of like to think that I was obsessed with the past and the people who lived in the past. So when, you know, you're walking through a graveyard and you think about, you know, who was this person? What did they look like? What was it like to live in that period? And I was just always really attracted to the past and to history and I wanted to study it more. So that kind of passion for history developed into, I went and did my master's and I did my PhD at Oxford and I loved it because Oxford had this amazing experience where they allow you to sort of live history as well, not just study it. You get to go into these incredible libraries and touch history. And so there's always been this attraction to sort of touching history or interacting with it in a visual kind of way. Joseph Lister is such an important figure and, you know, in the past he was on a mission to change surgery. And I guess I feel like I'm on a bit of a mission that Lister's name is just as familiar to people as the names Charles Darwin and Sir Isaac Newton. Because what he did essentially was to usher surgery into the modern era. You definitely get this very clean before and after shot. You know, before Lister it's bloody, it's dirty, they don't understand germs, people are dying at extremely high rates of infection. And after you have these clean operating theaters. And today we still use antiseptice techniques in the operating theaters. So I think that's a really important story to tell. And I think that Lister's name, although familiar to a lot of people through the product Listerine, which he actually didn't invent but was inspired by his antiseptic techniques, it's really important that his name actually be familiar to people in the way that these great scientists from the past are known. I think the most challenging thing for me as a historian and then also wanting to tell a really engaging story was the fact that sometimes when you're looking at Lister's life or any historical figure's life, you think, wow, I wish it had kind of played out in a certain way that would really help the pacing a bit. But obviously you have to stick to the facts. So my biggest challenge was just telling this really complex story about the scientific past, the medical past, in a way that was engaging and hopefully keeps people coming back to it and turning the page. And I hope that I was able to do that. I love to tell the stories on YouTube. I think that, again, it's really important to interact with history in a visual way, not just a textual way. You can pick up a book and you can read about the past, which is a great way of engaging and learning about history. But there's something really special about bringing the visual element in. And the thing that my team and I like to do with the YouTube channel is bring a lot of humor as well, because obviously the medical past was a horrible place. I mean, people were dying. And it's difficult to always convey these stories because they can be very heavy stories, you know, patient after patient dying. So we try to find funny, engaging ways to talk about these rather awful stories. And hopefully at the end of that, people watch these videos and are interested enough to go seek information elsewhere, whether it's in books or in museums. And that's what I really love about doing Under the Knife. A book trailer, it's kind of a funny thing. Not a lot of authors do it. But I just wanted to make something, again, that brings that visual aspect to life. And I know these incredibly talented people. So my friend Alex Anstey at Light Arcade, he decided he was going to help me film this. And it was just really lovely to see my book come to life just for a single day. So for me, it was just about the fun. But hopefully people will watch the trailer and get really excited about the book. Because what I've tried to do with the book is to bring that world to life through words and these horrible descriptions about what was going on in the past. So hopefully people get excited when they watch the trailer. But for me, it was just this sort of pure joy of creating something visual about this fascinating period that I've been obsessed with for the past several years. One of my favorite stories about Lister is when he's a medical student. And his instructor, Erickson, has this patient that's brought into the operating theater. And she's asphyxiating on this blood and pus from this neck wound that she suffered from. And it's clear that she's about to die. And Erickson, again, this is before the concept of germs, before any kind of real sense of cleanliness. He decides what he's going to do is put his mouth on this wound and suck the blood and pus out. And he does it, he takes three mouthfuls and he spits it out. And miraculously, she comes back to life and she survives this sort of horrible incident. But it really illustrates just how different it was before Lister brings in germ theory and develops antiseptic techniques. I mean, can you imagine a surgeon doing that today? So if you're interested in learning more about Joseph Lister and the brutal and bloody world of Victorian surgery, go check out my book trailer on my YouTube channel, Under the Knife. And you can also check me out on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.