History of medicine: Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptics. As a young boy living in England, he was very interested in botany and zoology and studied to become a doctor in London. In 1846, he saw the first operation to be performed under anaesthetic. Unfortunately, many people who survived the surgery died later from infection. In 1860, he became chief surgeon at the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow. This hospital had the worst reputation in the country. If the patient was sent there, he felt he was being condemned to death. Lister realised the problem lay in the dirty methods used by both doctors and nurses who moved from patient to patient without washing their hands. One day, a professor suggested to Lister that he read an article written by Louis Pasteur who discovered germs while studying fermentation. Lister was then convinced that the infection was caused by these living bacteria getting into the wounds. Lister immediately got to work, making sure that nurses and doctors washed their hands thoroughly between each patient. This was a good start, but he knew that it wouldn't kill all the germs and so he set about to find something stronger. One day, a friend told him of an engineer who had used carbolic acid to kill the smell of sewage. Lister decided to experiment with this, and on 12 August 1865, he put a layer of undiluted carbolic acid on the leg wound of James Greenlees. The wound was a bad one and Lister waited anxiously for signs of infection. On the fourth day, there was no sign of infection, just some slight burns around the wound's edges. He realised the undiluted acid was too strong to apply directly to skin, but it inspired him to spray a carbolic acid throughout the operating theatre to kill the germs while the surgeons were operating. After completing many surgeries and seeing that his methods worked, he published a number of articles to medical journals, but it took 25 years before people were convinced that his methods were the answer to stop an infection. Having started as a quiet, modest, hard-working person, more interested in others than himself, after all of his work, he was the first doctor to be made a lord.