Joseph Lister was an ordinary surgeon who made surgery survivable
By technical skill alone, Joseph Lister was nothing special in the operating theatre. What set him apart was the realisation that wounds rot because of germs. Spraying carbolic acid on instruments, hands, stitches and wards at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, he cut post-operative infection and earned the title father of modern surgery.
Lister was born on 5 April 1827 in Upton, then a village outside London, into a prosperous Quaker family. His father, Joseph Jackson Lister, was a wine merchant and gentleman scientist who spent some thirty years perfecting the compound microscope. He discovered a principle of lens alignment that eliminated a blurring defect called coma, an advance that helped turn tissue study into a science and won him a fellowship of the Royal Society by 1832.
Young Joseph stammered and was taught at home until eleven, then attended Quaker schools in Hitchin and Tottenham, where his father insisted he learn French and German. Oxford and Cambridge were closed to him because of religious tests, so he went to University College London, one of the few places that admitted Quakers. The university required an arts degree before medicine; he took his BA in December 1847 with distinction in classics and botany, surviving a mild case of smallpox along the way.
He enrolled in medicine in 1849, carrying a microscope from his father, and won medals in anatomy, physiology and botany. The physiologist William Sharpey gave him a lifelong passion for experimental physiology and the study of tissues. The family connection mattered too: his father's former business partner was the grandfather of Marcus Beck, a surgeon who later championed Lister's methods.
Lister's legacy rests on four pillars: antiseptic practice using carbolic acid, the compound now called phenol; research on inflammation and blood flow in healing wounds; microscopic analysis of specimens for diagnosis; and strategies to improve survival after operations. Underlying all of it was his insight, drawing on Louis Pasteur's germ theory of fermentation, that putrefaction in wounds is caused by living germs. He was made a baron and died on 10 February 1912. His nephew Rickman Godlee, a surgeon to Queen Victoria, wrote his biography in 1917.
Source: Joseph Lister
