The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

Lindsey Fitzharris

Oct 2017 · Sold by Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

Winner, 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing
Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize
A Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly
A Best History Book of 2017, The Guardian

"Warning: She spares no detail!" —Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake

In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters—no place for the squeamish—and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed and brute strength. These pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than patients’ afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn’t have been more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the riddle and change the course of history.

Fitzharris dramatically reconstructs Lister’s career path to his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be countered by a sterilizing agent applied to wounds. She introduces us to Lister’s contemporaries—some of them brilliant, some outright criminal—and leads us through the grimy schools and squalid hospitals where they learned their art, the dead houses where they studied, and the cemeteries they ransacked for cadavers.

Eerie and illuminating, The Butchering Art celebrates the triumph of a visionary surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into the modern world.

Ratings and reviews

I love history, it's so interesting and I think everyone should read as much history as possible from Ancient history to the present in all areas of life, it's a necessary learning tool to understand who we were, who we are and who we hope to be . Every human being is from the people in our human history. I really liked what I've read so far in this book, it is very informative, somewhat macabre but it shows how brave the patients were and how brilliant some of our ancestors were and how much passion there was to make surgery less painful and less deadly. AMAZING !!!

historical-places-events, medical, horror, nonfiction, surgery, infections ---------- If you thought battlefield surgery was brutal long before the present, hospital surgery and care was just as horrendous. In detailing the influences and motivations of the most influential doctor of the 19th century with regards to sepsis and antisepsis the reader is immersed in the horrors that comprised the hospital care of the day. If one is naive enough to believe that nosocomial infections are only a product of careless use of antibiotics today, this will set the record straight. It was a hard-won victory to convince such a hide bound profession to accept as truth what the microscope proved. Along the way the reader is given a glimpse of the judicial system and the horrors of the industrial revolution. Extremely well researched and graphically written. Two disclaimers: I have been a RN since 1968. Also, I had originally requested and received a free review copy via NetGalley, but was unable to sight read it. Recently I bought a TTS enabled copy .

wasn't sure about this book when I started but what an amazing read! thoroughly enjoyed all the gore and couldn't put it down.

About the author

Lindsey Fitzharris has a PhD in the history of science and medicine from the University of Oxford. She is the creator of the popular website The Chirurgeon's Apprentice, and is the writer and presenter of the YouTube series Under the Knife. She writes for The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Lancet, and New Scientist.