Joseph Lister

Before King-Emperor George V, waiting at Buckingham Palace last week, went 100 erudite men to retell, rhetorically, the world's obligations to Baron Joseph Lister, born just 100 years before, dead but 15 years. Said Sir Ernest Rutherford, President of the Royal Society: "It may well be doubted whether the scientific activities of any other man achieved as much for the saving of human life and the prevention and relief of the physical sufferings which afflict mankind."

To this His Majesty replied: "It is hard now to realize the dread and apprehension with which formerly even minor surgical operations were regarded. The change in our ideas is due partly to the discovery of anesthetics and perhaps even more to Lister's work."

These were mild eulogies, spoken by men who might not now be alive, were it not for the sanitary, antiseptic methods which Lister taught the midwives of his time. Many men have forgotten Joseph Lister's work in antisepsis. Few now know the meaning of "to listerize" and of "listerism," words brought into the language as a tribute to him. Were it not for the Lambert Pharmacal Co.'s broadcasting of Listerine (aromatic antiseptic), his name would have disappeared altogether from the colloquial tongue.

And yet it is scarcely 60 years since hospitals were like charnel houses. Every other patient then carried into a hospital for surgical treatment, was carried out dead of blood poisoning, his wound a stinking fester. Joseph Lister, a young surgeon in Glasgow, smelled at the festers. They reminded him of sewage; and sewage reminded him of how the city of Carlisle was deodorizing its wastes--by carbolic acid. He slopped carbolic acid on the open wounds of accident cases brought to him. The acid worked; it prevented development of horrid "hospital gangrene." Joseph Lister had discovered antisepsis and thenceforth surgery became cleanly. Surgeons now wash their hands before operating; and they wear sterilized gloves, caps and aprons, and even tie gauze masks over their mouths to prevent foul breath contaminating the entrails of patients. Many surgeons realize the "why" of their precautions; most take their procedure for granted. Lister to them, as to the vast majority of their patients, is now--except for a mild centennial--only a name, a Hippocrates, a Galen, a little revered Esculapius.