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 ...

Operating areas of hospitals were a gory, infectious mess until Joseph Lister thought to take the fight to germs. Corbis/VCG via Getty Images The only place you’d expect to encounter the “unmistakable ...

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 ...

Pain Patients were awake during operations. This meant they were often screaming and moving around during surgery, making it difficult for the surgeon to carry out an operation. Infection In surgery, ...

1867: British surgeon Joseph Lister performs the first surgery under antiseptic conditions. Death rates would plummet, but you should still be thankful you were born in the 20th century and not the ...

Imagine facing a surgery without anesthesia, in a smelly operating room that was not clean or sterile with a surgeon wearing a blood-stained apron. We all would run screaming out the door! Prior to ...

What was the most dangerous place in the vast territories of the British Empire in the 19th century? Was it the savage savannas of Zululand? Perhaps the frozen wastes of the Northwest Passage, or the ...

For most of 1800s, surgery was disgusting, filthy and unsafe. Without anesthesia, speed was of the absolute essence. Robert Liston, one of the most prominent surgeons of the 19th century, accidentally ...

A woman was stabbed in the early hours of Friday 27 June by her drunk husband in the streets of London. The year was 1851 and Jeremiah Sullivan, 59, had invited his wife Julia, a mother of eight, for ...

ASHWAUBENON - The National Railroad Museum is giving new life to a historic train car. The Joseph Lister hospital car, built in 1930, will open to the public on April 21 after nearly three years of ...

British science writer Fitzharris slices into medical history with this excellent biography of Joseph Lister, the 19th-century “hero of surgery.” Lister championed the destruction of microorganisms in ...