The First Antiseptic Surgery

On August 12, 1865, Glasgow surgeon Joseph Lister dressed an eleven-year-old boy's shattered leg with carbolic acid instead of reaching for the saw. In Lister's ward, close to half of all amputation patients died of infection, and a bone that broke through the skin was usually an argument for amputation. Drawing on Louis Pasteur's work and a sewage disinfectant used on English fields, Lister tested one idea: that wound infection has a living, external cause, and can therefore be blocked.Send me a text!Support the show