Lindsey Fitzharris on “The Butchering Art”

Surgery in the nineteenth-century was pretty gruesome – a lot of blood, pain, saws and no sanitation.  In fact, operating theaters used to be called “gateways of death” because so many people died under the knife. That was until a young Quaker doctor, Joseph Lister, transformed surgery by advancing germ theory and introducing antiseptics. Medical historian LINDSEY FITZHARRIS writes about how Lister revolutionized medicine in her new book, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s’ Quest to Transformed the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine