The surgeon had just finished successfully operating on a patient. It was the last one for the day and he was eager to get back home to his family. As he walked back, he mulled over his work. He had done his best job, but he knew that over 50% of patients operated on died of infection afterwards; in parts of Europe, it was as high as 80%. Scientists believed that infections arose spontaneously within the body, so there was nothing that could be done about this: we just had to live with it. This was all to change in 1860.
One day the French Catholic, Louis Pasteur, triumphantly proclaimed that his experiments had proved that life came from life, rather than from spontaneous generation. Before this, scientists had observed that an unsealed glass of water, when left alone, will eventually produce bacteria. Their conclusion was that water spontaneously evolved into simple life forms. When Pasteur boiled water and sealed off all of the air in special glass tubes, no bacteria formed. In one fell swoop he had vanquished a popular pagan theory that had held back science for centuries, and demonstrated the new germ theory, that contamination comes from outside bacteria.
Joseph Lister came up to Edinburgh from England in 1853 to learn from Professor James Syme, a Christian who was regarded as the country’s best teacher of surgery. Lister came from a devout Quaker family, but when he met Syme’s daughter Agnes he fell in love with her, and they were married. Lister remained in Edinburgh, as Syme’s assistant, attending an Episcopalian Church with the family. In 1860, during the year of Pasteur’s discovery, he became the Professor of Surgery in Glasgow. It was there that a friend lent him some papers by Pasteur. As he read of Pasteur’s work, his heart and mind were racing with excitement. This new germ theory could be extended to medical science and save lives. He needed a chemical which was harmless to people, but which would disinfect the body, cleansing it of potentially lethal bacteria. He found out that carbolic acid was being used safely by workers to disinfect sewers.
By 1865, Lister was using carbolic acid in his surgery: he washed his hands in it, before and after operations; he cleansed his surgical instruments with it, as well as bandages, and even sprayed the air with it. Lister published the results of his antisepsis method in the medical journal Lancet between March and July in 1867, reporting that his surgical wards were clear of sepsis. Between 1864 and 1866, before he had introduced antisepsis, 46% of his own patients had died after surgical operations (which was better than average); after introducing his new treatment there was a dramatic change, with 15% of his patients dying between 1867 and 1870.
Two years later he took up the post as Professor of Clinical surgery in Edinburgh, replacing his father-in-law. From there he wrote to Pasteur in 1874, thanking him for his “brilliant researches”, which he said had “proved to me the truth of the germ theory… and furnished me with the principle upon which alone the antiseptic system can be carried out.”2By 1875 Lister was highly acclaimed in Europe, with post-operation fatalities rapidly falling as surgeons applied his principles, and in some cases, as in Munich, fatalities dropped dramatically from 80%.
But Lister was not only a one-trick pony: he went on to invent surgical instruments, introduce sterilised wiring to aid healing bones, rubber drainage tubes, and sterilised catgut, which would harmlessly disintegrate in the body after a time. Lister was made the first Lord in British medical history and was a committed Christian, who wrote: “I am a believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.”3 We have become used to antiseptics, especially during the Coronavirus pandemic, but without Lister’s work in medical science, so many more people would have died.
“Heal the sick…” (Matthew 10:8, NKJV).
Image: Lord Joseph Lister (1827-1912), Weltrundschau zu Reclams Universum 1902, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons