Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister, Bt., OM, FRS, PC, known as Sir Joseph Lister, Bt.,
between 1883 and 1897, was a British surgeon and a pioneer of antiseptic surgery.
By applying Louis Pasteur's advances in microbiology, he promoted the idea of sterile surgery while
working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
Lister successfully introduced carbolic acid to sterilise surgical instruments and to clean
wounds, which led to a reduction in post-operative infections and made surgery safer for patients.
Early life and education Lister came from a prosperous Quaker home
in West Hampton, Essex, a son of Joseph Jackson Lister, a pioneer of achromatic object lenses
for the compound microscope.
At school, he became a fluent reader of French and German.
As a teenager, Lister attended Grove House School Tottenham, studying mathematics, natural
science, and languages.
He attended University College London, one of only a few institutions which accepted
Quakers at that time.
He initially studied botany and obtained a bachelor of Arts degree in 1847.
He registered as a medical student and graduated with honours as Bachelor of Medicine, subsequently
entering the Royal College of Surgeons at the age of 26.
In 1854, Lister became both first assistant to and friend of surgeon James Syme at the
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in Scotland.
In 1867, Lister championed the use of carbolic acid as an antiseptic, such that it became
the first widely used antiseptic in surgery.
He first suspected it would prove an adequate disinfectant because it was used to ease the
stench from fields irrigated with sewage waste.
He presumed it was safe because fields treated with carbolic acid produced no apparent ill-effects
on the livestock that later grazed upon them.
He subsequently left the Quakers, joined the Scottish Episcopal Church, and eventually
married Syme's daughter, Agnes.
On their honeymoon, they spent 3 months visiting leading medical institutes in France and Germany.
By this time, Agnes was enamoured of medical research and was Lister's partner in the laboratory
for the rest of her life.
Career Until Lister's studies of surgery, most people
believed that chemical damage from exposures to bad air was responsible for infections
in wounds.
Hospital wards were occasionally aired out at midday as a precaution against the spread
of infection via miasma, but facilities for washing hands or a patient's wound's were
not available.
A surgeon was not required to wash his hands before seeing a patient because such practices
were not considered necessary to avoid infection.
Despite the work of Ignaz Semmelweis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., hospitals practiced surgery
under unsanitary conditions.
Surgeons of the time referred to the "good old surgical stink" and took pride in the
accumulated stains on their unwashed operating gowns as a display of their experience.
While he was a professor of surgery at the University of Glasgow, Lister became aware
of a paper published by the French chemist, Louis Pasteur, showing that rotting and fermentation
food could occur under anaerobic conditions if micro-organisms were present.
Pasteur suggested three methods to eliminate the micro-organisms responsible for gangrene:
filtration, exposure to heat, or exposure to solution/chemical solutions.
Lister confirmed Pasteur's conclusions with his own experiments and decided to use his
findings to develop "antiseptic" techniques for wounds.
As the first two methods suggested by Pasteur were inappropriate for the treatment of human
tissue, Lister experimented with the third.
In 1834, Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge discovered phenol, also known as carbolic acid, which
he derived in an impure form from coal tar.
At that time, there was uncertainty between the substance of creosote - a chemical had
been used to treat the wood used for railway ties and ships since it protected the wood
from rotting - and carbolic acid.
Upon hearing that creosote had been used for treating sewage, Lister began to test the
efficacy of carbolic acid when applied directly to wounds.
Therefore, Lister tested the results of spraying instruments, the surgical incisions, and dressings
with a solution of it.
Lister found that carbolic acid solution swabbed on wounds remarkably reduced the incidence
of gangrene.
In August 1865, Lister applied a piece of lint dipped in carbolic acid solution onto
the wound of an eleven-year-old boy at Glasgow Infirmary, who had sustained a compound fracture
after a cart wheel had passed over his leg.
After four days, he renewed the pad and discovered that no infection had developed, and after
a total of six weeks he was amazed to discover that the boy's bones had fused back together,
without the danger of suppuration.
He subsequently published his results in The Lancet in a series of 6 articles, running
from March through July 1867.
He instructed surgeons under his responsibility to wear clean gloves and wash their hands
before and after operations with 5% carbolic acid solutions.
Instruments were also washed in the same solution and assistants sprayed the solution in the
operating theatre.
One of his additional suggestions was to stop using porous natural materials in manufacturing
the handles of medical instruments.
Lister left Glasgow in 1869, returning to Edinburgh as successor to Syme as Professor
of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh and continued to develop improved methods
of antisepsis and asepsis.
His fame had spread by then, and audiences of 400 often came to hear him lecture.
As the "germ theory of disease" became more widely accepted, it was realised that infection
could be better avoided by preventing bacteria from getting into wounds in the first place.
This led to the rise of sterile surgery.
On the centenary of his death, in 2012, Lister was considered by most in the medical field
as "the father of modern surgery".
Surgical technique Lister moved from Scotland to King's College
Hospital, in London.
In 1881 he was elected President of the Clinical Society of London.
He also developed a method of repairing kneecaps with metal wire and improved the technique
of mastectomy.
Among his students at King's College London was Robert Hamilton Russell, who later moved
to Australia.
Later life
Lister retired from practice after his wife, who had long helped him in research, died
in 1892 in Italy, during one of the few holidays they allowed themselves.
Studying and writing lost appeal for him and he sank into religious melancholy.
Despite suffering a stroke, he still came into the public light from time to time.
On 24 August 1902 Edward VII came down with appendicitis two days before his scheduled
coronation.
Like all internal surgery at the time, the appendectomy needed by the King still posed
an extremely high risk of death by post-operational infection, and surgeons did not dare operate
without consulting Britain's leading surgical authority.
Lister obligingly advised them in the latest antiseptic surgical methods, and the King
survived, later telling Lister, "I know that if it had not been for you and your work,
I wouldn't be sitting here today."
Lister died on 10 February 1912 at his country home in Walmer, Kent at the age of 84.
After a funeral service at Westminster Abbey, he was buried at West Hampstead Cemetery,
London in a plot to the south-east of central chapel.
Both the baronetcy and barony became extinct on his death.
Legacy and honours
Lister was president of the Royal Society between 1895 and 1900.
Following his death, a Memorial Fund led to the founding of the Lister Medal, seen as
the most prestigious prize that could be awarded to a surgeon.
His discoveries were greatly praised and in 1883 he was created a Baronet, of Park Crescent
in the Parish of St Marylebone in the County of Middlesex.
In 1897 he was further honoured when he was raised to the peerage as Baron Lister, of
Lyme Regis in the County of Dorset.
He also became one of the twelve original members of the Order of Merit and a Privy
Councillor in the Coronation Honours in 1902.
Among foreign honours, he received Prussia´s highest order of merit, the Pour le mérite.
Two postage stamps were issued in September 1965 to honour Lister for his contributions
to antiseptic surgery.
Lister is one of the two surgeons in the United Kingdom who have the honour of having a public
monument in London.
Lister's stands in Portland Place; the other surgeon is John Hunter.
There is a statue of Lister in Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow, celebrating his links with
the city.
In 1903, the British Institute of Preventative Medicine was renamed The Lister Institute
in honour of Lister.
The building, along with another adjacent building, forms what is now the Lister Hospital
in Chelsea, which opened in 1985.
In 2000, it became part of the HCA group of hospitals.
A building at Glasgow Royal Infirmary which houses cytopathology, microbiology and pathology
departments was named in his honour to recognise his work at the hospital.
Lister Hospital in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, England is named in honour of Lister.
The Discovery Expedition of 1901–04 named the highest point in the Royal Society Range,
Antarctica, Mount Lister.
In 1879, Listerine mouthwash was named after him for his work in antisepsis.
Microorganisms named in his honour include the pathogenic bacterial genus Listeria named
by J.H.H.
Pirie, typified by the food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes, as well as the slime
mould genus Listerella, first described by Eduard Adolf Wilhelm Jahn in 1906.
He is depicted in the Academy Award winning 1936 film, The Story of Louis Pasteur, by
Halliwell Hobbes.
In the film, Lister is one of the beleaguered microbiologist's most noted supporters in
the otherwise largely hostile medical community and is the key speaker in the ceremony in
his honour.
See also Discoveries of anti-bacterial effects of penicillium
moulds before Fleming Joseph Sampson Gamgee
Listerine Museum of Health Care
Ignaz Semmelweis References
External links Works by Joseph Lister at Project Gutenberg
Works by Joseph Lister at LibriVox The Lister Institute
Collection of portraits of Lister at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Statue of Sir Joseph Lister by Louis Linck at The International Museum of Surgical Science
in Chicago Commemorative plaque to Lord Lister at the
Edinburgh Medical School