Audiobook · read by volunteers
On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery
Joseph Lister (1827–1912)
Read by Martin Clifton · 1 chapter · 31 min
About the book
In the middle of the nineteenth century, a surgeon could do everything right and still lose a patient to infection. Wounds festered, and hospitals were feared as places where people went to die of the very thing they were treated for. In 1867, the English surgeon Joseph Lister, then working in Glasgow, published a short paper on a new method: cleanse the wound, protect it, and keep the germs out. On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery is the text in which this idea is set out, step by step. The prose is plain and the argument practical, with case notes and a clear conviction that the results speak for themselves. It lasts barely half an hour. For anyone curious about the history of medicine, it offers a rare chance to hear a turning point in the words of the man who brought it about.
Introduction
Joseph Lister (1827-1912) was born near London and studied medicine at the University of London. He pursued a career as a surgeon in Scotland, became professor of surgery in Glasgow and later, in 1877, at King's College Hospital in London. His contribution to surgery is hard to overstate. The text is short, but it combines argument, description and case histories, so it gives a surprisingly complete view of how the method was applied and why it mattered.
Before antisepsis, wounds were commonly left open to heal, and long recoveries, scarring, amputation and death from infection were all too frequent. Lister's methods allowed many more wounds to be closed with sutures, shortening healing and saving limbs and lives. He retired in 1896, but was called back to assist at the operation on King Edward VII for appendicitis, just days before the king's coronation. The paper recorded here dates from 1867 and is one of the founding documents of modern surgery. It is written in the manner of a scientific communication, with a direct style that sets out the reasoning and the evidence for the method. It builds on the work of Louis Pasteur on the role of microorganisms in decay, and it uses carbolic acid as the antiseptic agent. Some details will seem dated, but the principle has not changed.
The recording has one chapter and lasts about half an hour. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer.
It is worth hearing today as a reminder of how much a simple idea, carefully tested, can change the course of medicine, and how recent that change really is.
Public domain
Joseph Lister died in 1912: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text