To judge from The Butchering Art, a fine and long overdue biography of the great physician Joseph Lister by Lindsey Fitzharris, the answer might be a much more domestic corner of empire: the Victorian teaching hospital ... Ms. Fitzharris, a historian of medicine, is occasionally fuzzy on clinical matters ...she avoids the more problematic aspects of Lister’s career, most notably his opposition to female medical students... But her biography of Lister restores this neglected champion of evidence-based medicine to a central place in the history of medicine ...a formidable achievement — a rousing tale told with brio, featuring a real-life hero worthy of the ages and jolts of Victorian horror to rival the most lurid moments of Wilkie Collins.
This book tells a gripping tale of scientific and medical endeavour — but the squeamish reader should be warned in advance that Lindsey Fitzharris does not stint on the gory details ... In fact, as Fitzharris’s painstakingly detailed descriptions of life in hospitals and industrial cities make clear, germ-harbouring dirt and waste were a permanent feature of everyday life. She paints a vivid picture of the stench and horror of the London that Lister knew as a medical student ... Lister, described by a contemporary as 'modest, unmasterful, unassuming' doesn’t exactly leap off the page of this otherwise eye-popping book. But his achievements echo down the years in all sorts of unlikely ways.
The book makes no bones (pun unfortunately intended) about what you'll find inside — it's subtitled Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, so you're duly forewarned ... At heart, it's a slender but effective biography of Lister, the sort of comforting historical figure more interested in his work than his legacy ... The Butchering Art traces Lister's lifelong obsession with finding an antiseptic treatment, a quest balanced somewhere between serendipity and Sisyphus... Lindsey Fitzharris tries to paint a vivid picture without unnecessary gore, but so much gore is necessary...very careful to emphasize the many threads of scientific study that come together in a sea change like this one ...in an era where science is as much a battleground as it was two centuries ago, there is something that feels vital in a book about horrors everyone accepted as the costs of doing business, and the importance of persistence in seeing results.
Lindsey Fitzharris’s slim, atmospheric The Butchering Art has its share of resplendent gore. The book is an imperfect first effort, stronger at the beginning than at the end, and a bit workaday when it isn’t freaky — it floats less on narrative momentum than on an armada of curious details. But the story it tells is one of abiding fascination, in part because it involves a paradigm shift so basic, so seemingly obvious, that one can scarcely believe the paradigm needed shifting in the first place.
In The Butchering Art, Lindsey Fitzharris delves into the perilous world of 19th-century surgery, revealing how Lister struggled to determine the basis of infection and to establish his pioneering antiseptic system in the face of furious opposition. The result is not for the faint-hearted ... She paints a compelling portrait of a man of conviction, humour and, above all, humanity – the latter beautifully captured in the touching relationship between Lister and his father ...Fitzharris explores the intersection of Lister’s life, the development of antiseptic surgery, and the horrors of the wards with an almost surgical precision ... thoroughly enjoyable, tapping into the morbid pleasure of rubbernecking at the horrors of the past – safe in the knowledge that wounds today are not packed with damp earth.
Joseph Lister’s choice to become a surgeon was not the most obvious or reputable one for a Quaker growing up as the son of an esteemed scientist acclaimed for his improvements to the microscope ... It is thanks to Lister’s tenacity and belief in the efficacy of his techniques, despite widespread skepticism, that so many people today don’t have to look at surgery as a possible death sentence. Fitzharris knows how to engage readers in fascinating and shocking details about medical history. She clearly, if sometimes quickly, explains medical and scientific terms and techniques while also using novelistic details and narrative techniques to move the story along.
British science writer Fitzharris slices into medical history with this excellent biography of Joseph Lister, the 19th-century 'hero of surgery' ... She infuses her thoughtful and finely crafted examination of this revolution with the same sense of wonder and compassion Lister himself brought to his patients, colleagues, and students ...the context of a remarkable life and time.
