The butchering art : Joseph Lister's quest to transform the grisly world of Victorian medicine / Lindsey Fitzharris.

A dramatic account of how 19th-century Quaker surgeon Joseph Lister developed an antiseptic method that indelibly changed medicine, describes the practices and risks of early operating theaters as well as the belief systems of Lister's contemporaries.

"In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. 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 medical pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than their 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 deadly riddle and change the course of history. Fitzharris dramatically recounts Lister's discoveries in gripping detail, culminating in his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection--and could be countered by antiseptics. Focusing on the tumultuous period from 1850 to 1875, she introduces us to Lister and his contemporaries--some of them brilliant, some outright criminal--and takes us through the grimy medical schools and dreary hospitals where they learned their art, the deadhouses where they studied anatomy, and the graveyards they occasionally ransacked for cadavers." -- Publisher's description

London : Allen Lane, 2017.

286 pages ; 24 cm

Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-266) and index.

Prologue : The age of agony -- Through the lens -- Houses of death -- The sutured gut -- The altar of science -- The Napoleon of surgery -- The frog's legs -- Cleanliness and cold water -- They're all dead -- The storm -- The glass garden -- The queen's abscess -- Epilogue : The dark curtain, raised.

Longlisted for Wellcome Book Prize 2018.