This isn't anything unusual, given that this is the city Joseph Lister did his pioneering work in antisceptics. The Hunterian museum at Glasgow univeristy has some of his medical props behind a glass case that you can go and see, if you can navigate your way through the byzantine cloisters of Glasgow university, and I would recommend it; Glasgow university is where sanitation in the hospital theatre got down to business.
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| Joseph Lister. |
So, he essentially had an extensive apprenticeship in the world of surgery. In time, he became professor of Surgery at Glasgow university, and what struck him most was 'ward fever' - patients dying not from the trauma of surgery (no anaesthetic), but from something else.
Like all good scientists, he didn't work in isolation. Others had noticed. Florence Nightingale famously made a connection between bad hygiene and mortality rates. However, less known to history was the work by a Hungarian doctor called Ignaz Semmelweiss. He argued that if a doctor went from one patient to another after doing surgery, that doctor would pass on to the next visited patient a disease. He recommended washing hands in Calcium Chloride between each patient. He was virtually ignored, and tragically died of blood poisoning in 1865. However, he had been on the right track and under his watch mortality rates dropped from 12% to 1%.
At this time, Louis Pasteur and John Snow had developed the idea that bacteria were the cause of diseases, and these bacteria could be spread through the air or by liquid. It didn't take much of a leap for Lister to conclude that the deaths in hospitals were being caused by the transmission of bacteria to a body weakened by surgery. He concluded that the wound itself had to be cleansed. He covered the wound with a piece of lint covered in carbolic acid. He used this on patients who had a compound fracture. This is where the broken bone had penetrated the skin, leaving an exposed wound. This usually lead to gangrene and then death. Lister covered the wound made with lint soaked in carbolic acid, severely reducing deaths from this.
Lister then invented a machine, which you can see in the Hunterian, that would spray a fine mist of carbolic acid around during surgery, and he became famous for reducing post-surgery deaths overall.
The old, decaying, relics at the Hunterian just look like any other Victorian mad-scientist equipment, but they aren't. It's countless how many people were saved by this machine and its descendents. It's people like Joseph Lister who took a conservative, ossified, important branch of medicine kicking and screaming into a new mindset, where high levels of avoidable death just weren't acceptable anymore. The Victorians were both cool and weird - that the establishment fought against progress like this, in the face of good scientific evidence, shows how cliquey they were, even though they purported to be objective rationalists.
Joseph Lister died on the 10th February 1912, leaving the world a much better place than when he came into it, and for that his memory is honoured, and why Glasgow loves to claim him as one of our own.
