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Joesph Lister was born at Upton, Essex, England in 1827. In 1852, he received a medical degree from University College in London with honors. Lister spent the majority of his professional life in Scotland. In 1860 he became a surgeon at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and a Professor of Surgery at the University of Glasgow.
Lister was in charge of the surgical wards at the Glasgow Infirmary. He was outraged at the high postoperative mortality rate. During this time, Infections after surgery, such as gangrene, were common because of poor hygiene practices in hospitals and clinics throughout the world.
In 1865, after reading a paper by Louis Pasteur, he learned about the germ theory of disease. He reasoned that if infections were caused by microbes, the best way of preventing infections would be to kill the microbes before they reached the open wound. Lister used carbolic acid to kill germs. He wrote about the use of this acid in his work, “Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery,”
“The material which I have employed is carbolic or phenic acid, a volatile organic compound, which appears to exercise a peculiar destructive influence upon low forms of life, and hence is the most powerful antiseptic with which we are at present acquainted.”
Lister continues with an account of the recovery of a patient who was treated with carbolic acid paste,
“The medical gentleman under whose care he was supervised the daily dressing with the carbolic acid paste till the patient went to spend two or three weeks at the coast, when his wife was entrusted with it. Just two months after I opened the abscess, he called to show me the limb, stating that the discharge had been, for at least two weeks, as little as it was then, a trifling moisture upon the paste, such as might be accounted for by the little sore caused by the incision. On applying a probe guarded with an antiseptic rag, I found that the sinus was soundly closed, while the limb was from swelling or tenderness; and, although he had not attempted to exercise it much, the joint could already be moved through a considerable angle. Here the antiseptic principle had effected the restoration of a joint.”
Lister instituted strict antiseptic procedures into the hospital routine. He washed his hands before operations and cleaned the instruments and dressings. As a result of these hygiene procedures, the rate of postoperative fatalities was reduced significantly. He became famous for promoting hygiene procedures and establishing the early theories of antiseptic surgery. In later years, the mouthwash Listerine was named after him.
He lectured throughout Germany and the United States informing medical professionals of his hygiene techniques. In 1877, he was given the Chair of Clinical Surgery at King’s College in London. He also served as president of the Royal Society. In 1883, he was made a baronet. He was Queen Victoria’s personal surgeon. In 1897, she gave him the title of Lord Lister, making him the first doctor to be elevated to the House of Lords. He died in 1912, in Walmer, England.
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