Monday, March 15, 2021

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


Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐

It will surprise no one that surgery was dangerous in the nineteenth century (and, as a result, every century before that). Not the surgery itself, but the aftermath when infections were likely, causing death rates to soar. Here you will read about the operating theatres and can easily imagine being in the room as surgeons worked quickly and without anesthesia. I am grossed out very easily by all manner of bodily fluids, so there were definitely parts I had to skim or I would have been gagging. If you suffer from a similarly quick gag-reflex I would still recommend this highly engaging and illuminating work, and skim over certain parts like I did.

Not until Dr. Joseph Lister came along would this seemingly complex mystery be solved - what caused infections post-op, and how could they be prevented? We are fully immersed in his world from the start. In addition to front row seats in the operating theatres, we go along to the dreary and disgusting hospitals, dead houses, even graveyards to procure bodies for the med students to practice on. Hospitals were considered the last option, especially if you were wealthy, due to the filthy conditions, and were basically where one went to die instead of heal.

Surgeons in particular were a nasty bunch. They certainly did not wash their hands, nor their tools or clothing as they went from patient to patient, living or dead. At the time, the death rate post-op was a ghastly 90%. Congrats on surviving a painful and bloody surgery, your reward is a painful and less-bloody death. The idea of germs, something so small they could not be seen, being the root cause of so much death was unfathomable and it would take several long, arduous years for Lister to convince colleagues of his discoveries.

Yet this is the world Dr. Lister wanted to be part of and we should be eternally grateful for that fact. I can't even begin to count the number of lives saved due to Dr. Lister's experiments and the confidence he had in himself that he had found not only the cause of so many needless deaths, but also the cure. With the discovery of those pesky and microscopic germs, the field of medicine/healthcare was completely transformed - though not without struggle on Lister's part to get his colleagues to see the error of their ways and convince them of the merits of cleanliness.

Dr. Lister focused on the cleaning of surgical tools and operating tables, as well as cleanliness of hospitals and specifically the beds in which patients were supposed to recover. Often patients returned to lice and bedbugs, and were somehow expected to recover in such conditions.

Dr. Lister began experimenting with the best ways to rid both surgeons and patients of the germs he was certain were causing so many deaths. He conducted experiments and took extensive notes on what worked and what did not. He put his antiseptic theories to test by creating a system in which he used carbolic acid to clean both his hands and surgical equipment. He also used the acid to soak gauze, then he applied gauze to the would post-surgery.

As Dr. Lister found success with his new system, he faced extreme backlash from colleagues in the medical community - big surprise, many did not believe that germs were the root cause of the problem. This would prove to be his toughest battle, as few surgeons were willing to come around to his way of thinking.

Overall I found this to be an incredibly captivating account of the practices of medicine in the 19th century. The advances Dr. Lister made still impact us today. I admire his work greatly; it would have very easy for him to give up, given the pushback he received from others. Yet he persevered and we should be grateful for that.

Highly recommended.

16 comments:

  1. I recently bought this book, so I’m glad you liked it! I’m fascinated by the history of medicine. It’s so weird and gross.

    Aj @ Read All The Things!

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    1. Weird and gross is right! I read one recently called Blood and Guts: A short History of Medicine by Roy Porter. It was interesting, but this one is definitely where I would start.

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  2. sounds gross all right. i hate the thought of the current state of surgery, so i can only imagine how this would affect me. lol
    sherry @ fundinmental

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  3. Isn't it amazing to realize that it took so long to figure out what was causing the infections and resultant deaths? So many things that we take so much for granted today were only discovered with great difficulty. It makes one wonder what will be taken for granted in the future that we struggle with today.

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    1. That is a very sobering thought. Today I was wearing a mask at school that had a plague doctor on it. My students asked what it was so I explained plague doctors and what doctors/medicine were like a couple hundred years ago and the kids just could not believe it. It is hard to believe sometimes that Lister's discoveries only came about in the 150+ years.

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  4. I do find it amazing at just how many *doctors* ACTIVELY opposed what we now consider common-sense health measures - like WASHING YOUR HANDS - and how many of them completely dismissed Germ Theory even AFTER it have been shown to be true. Amazing the species survived I think. Thank Evolution for the immune system!! [lol]

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    1. Hell yeah! We'd have died out as a species a long time ago without that. It's also really interesting to me how long the idea of the four humours lasted - less than two hundred years ago was it finally given the boot. Lister is the one we need to thank; who knows how long that nonsense might have dragged on had he not figured it out.

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  5. Sounds like a really interesting read! I grew up around those in the healthcare system and am thinking of jumping into that path myself so this kinda stuff makes me feel right at home.

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    1. I love it too, though I am squeamish. But the evolution of medicine is so fascinating to me, I'll read everything i can and just skip the yucky parts.

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  6. This sounds super creepy and morbid... like just reading your review will probably give me nightmares. I hate thinking about "science" and what people used to do for research. Progress, sure... but at the expense of living, breathing humans.

    Lindsi @ Do You Dog-ear? 💬

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    1. Luckily Lister came along when he did, otherwise who knows how long people might have gone on dying from infections!

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