Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister (1827 - 1912) was a surgeon in Glasgow. He realised that lots of his patients were dying from infections in their wounds or blood poisoning after surgery. Sometimes it was so bad, that a patient had several amputations on a leg to try to stop the infection spreading to the rest of the body.

Lister had read about Louis Pasteur and the work that he had done on germs, and realised that he had to remove as many germs from the operating theatre as he could. If there were little or none present during the operation, perhaps there would be no infection in the wound.

He knew that carbolic acid was being used to disinfect drains, so he tried using that on a dressing that he was putting on a young boy. The boy had been run over by a cart and his leg had been broken, leaving the bone exposed. That kind of wound would normally have become infected, but having used the carbolic acid on it, no infection appeared and the boy survived.

Following that success, Lister invented a carbolic spray, which he insisted on spraying the whole operating area with. He also insisted that all doctors and nurses, who were performing the operations, had to put on clean clothes, and that all the instruments they used, had to be disinfected too.

All the nurses thought he was a real crank and didn't like the extra work he made them do, but it was obvious, very quickly, that it greatly reduced the deaths from infection and blood poisoning at Lister's hospital.

Nowadays, we expect surgeons to 'scrub up' before performing an operation and always use clean instruments. It's all thanks to Joseph Lister.

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