The Butchering Art is primarily concerned with Lister the professional, the man who spurred an “epochal moment when medicine and science merged” (232).

That check was now gone and the large, urban hospitals that served the most disadvantaged in cramped and festering quarters were growing. But this revolution was a deadly one surgical pain may have been largely conquered, but pain had served as a check on the kinds of invasive procedures that most insistently invite infection. Joseph Lister – then a surgical student with an unorthodox interest in microscopes – attended that demonstration and came to professional maturity in a medical world revolutionized by the shift away from surgical agony that it signaled. The Butchering Art begins with Robert Liston’s experimental use of the drug as a surgical pain-killer at London’s University College Hospital on December 21, 1864. Lister’s work, building on the germ-theories of Louis Pasteur, “Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine” from a chaotic and deadly battle against seemingly inevitable infections to a more systematic and often successful battle against injury and disease.įitzharris, who earned her doctorate in the history of science, medicine and technology from the University of Oxford and created the website The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice, opens her first book at the close of the surgical “Age of Agony.” This was the period preceding the medical adoption of chloroform in the 1860’s. Lindsey Fitzharris’s 2017 The Butchering Art is a compelling medical biography of Joseph Lister, pioneer of antiseptic surgical theory and practice.

The grisly world of victorian medicine