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A Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers WeeklyThe gripping story of how Joseph Lister's antiseptic method changed medicine foreverIn 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, working before anesthesia, who 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.
About the Author
I am the author of The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, which won the PEN/E. O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing and has been translated into multiple languages. My TV series The Curious Life and Death of . . . aired on the Smithsonian Channel in 2020. I contribute regularly to The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and other notable publications, and hold a doctorate in the History of Science and Medicine from the University of Oxford. My next book, The Facemaker, will be released in June. It follows the harrowing story of Harold Gillies, the pioneering surgeon who rebuilt soldiers' faces during the First World War.
