Born in 1827, the son of a Quaker inventor – his father was a pioneer of microscopy – young Joseph developed an early interest in anatomy, spending one summer’s day happily scooping out the brains from a sheep’s head. Into the midst of this carnage, came Lister. The slightest self-inflicted nick could send a surgeon to his coffin. And the danger was not confined to patients. “After several days of agonising pain during which the wound blackened and festered, the organ finally fell off,” Fitzharris writes.
On board HMS Saturn, one seaman expired after developing a gangrenous penis. The “big four” – hospital gangrene, blood poisoning, pyaemia (multiple abscesses), and the skin infection erysipelas – snuffed out life wherever it clung on. This was life and death writ large, surgery being not a matter of delicate precision, but raw, bloody and often chaotic. The operating theatre packed for Liston’s demonstration of ether in 1846 was not merely stuffy, it was “plaguey hot”, while the Edinburgh slums weren’t just hellish – they “festered” like “weeping sores”. “The surgeon, wearing a blood-encrusted apron, rarely washed his hands or his instruments and carried with him into the theatre the unmistakable smell of rotting flesh,” writes Fitzharris, who, it becomes clear, never misses a chance to compound the horror.
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