Lister introduces antiseptic surgery
- Date
- 1865–1867
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Britain (Glasgow / Edinburgh)
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
Drawing on Louis Pasteur's emerging germ theory, the Scottish surgeon Joseph Lister concluded that the wound infections that killed many surgical patients were caused by airborne and contact microbes rather than by 'bad air'.
From 1865 he began applying carbolic acid (phenol) to wounds, dressings, instruments, and the surgeon's hands, and experimented with antiseptic sprays in the operating theatre. He first treated a compound fracture in an eleven-year-old boy with carbolic-soaked dressings, and in 1867 published his results in The Lancet, reporting dramatic reductions in gangrene and post-operative mortality. Combined with the recent advent of inhalation anaesthesia using ether (first publicly demonstrated by William Morton in Boston in 1846) and chloroform, which freed surgeons from the need to operate at desperate speed, Lister's antisepsis transformed surgery from a frequently fatal last resort into a far safer and more deliberate practice. Antiseptic and later aseptic techniques spread across Europe and beyond, slashing surgical death rates and making possible the more ambitious operations of modern medicine.
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Empires active in 1865–1867
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Maxwell formulates the theory of electromagnetism1865–1873
- Opening of the Suez Canal17 November 1869
- Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species24 November 1859
- Third Plague Pandemic begins in Yunnan1855 (origin in Yunnan); global spread from 1894
- Bell Patents the Telephone1876
- Edison's Electric Light and Central Power1879 (Pearl Street 1882)
Also relevant
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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