Joseph Lister
Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister, was an English surgeon, medical scientist, experimental pathologist and pioneer of antiseptic surgery and preventive healthcare. Lister revolutionised the craft of surgery by the use of close anatomical observation, in the same manner that John Hunter revolutionised the science of surgery.
From a technical viewpoint, Lister was not an exceptional surgeon, but his research into bacteriology and infection in wounds revolutionised surgery throughout the world.
Lister's contributions were four-fold. Firstly, as a surgeon at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, he introduced carbolic acid as a steriliser for surgical instruments, patients' skins, sutures, surgeons' hands, and wards, promoting the principle of antiseptics. Secondly, he researched the role of inflammation and tissue perfusion in the healing of wounds. Thirdly, he advanced diagnostic science by analysing specimens using microscopes. Fourthly, he devised strategies to increase the chances of survival after surgery. His most important contribution, however, was recognising that putrefaction in wounds is caused by germs, in connection to Louis Pasteur's then-novel germ theory of fermentation.
Lister's work led to a reduction in post-operative infections and made surgery safer for patients, leading to him being distinguished as the "father of modern surgery".
Early life
Lister was born to a prosperous, educated Quaker family in the village of Upton, then near but now in London, England. He was the fourth child and second son of four sons and three daughters born to gentleman scientist and wine merchant Joseph Jackson Lister and school assistant Isabella Lister née Harris. The couple married in a ceremony held in Ackworth, West Yorkshire on 14 July 1818.Lister's paternal great-great-grandfather, Thomas Lister was the last of several generations of farmers who lived in Bingley in West Yorkshire. Lister joined the Society of Friends as a young man and passed his beliefs on to his son, Joseph Lister. He moved to London in 1720 to open a tobacconist's shop in Aldersgate Street in the City of London. His son, John Lister, was born there. Lister's grandfather was apprenticed to watchmaker Isaac Rogers, in 1752 and followed that trade on his own account in Bell Alley, Lombard Street from 1759 to 1766. He then took over his father's tobacco business, but gave it up in 1769 in favour of working at his father-in-law Stephen Jackson's business as a wine-merchant at No 28 Old Wine and Brandy Values on Lothbury Street, opposite Tokenhouse Yard.
His father was a pioneer in the design of achromatic object lenses for use in compound microscopes He spent 30 years perfecting the microscope, and in the process, discovered the Law of Aplanatic Foci, building a microscope where the image point of one lens coincided with the focal point of another. Up until that time, the best higher magnification lenses produced an excessive secondary aberration known as a coma, which interfered with normal use. It was considered a major advance that elevated histology into an independent science. By 1832, Lister's work had built a reputation sufficient to enable his being elected to the Royal Society. His mother, Isabella, was the youngest daughter of master mariner Anthony Harris. Isabella worked at the Ackworth School, a Quaker school for the poor, assisting her widowed mother, the superintendent of the school.
The eldest daughter of the couple was Mary Lister. On 21 August 1851, she married the barrister Rickman Godlee of Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple, who belonged to the Friends meeting house in Plaistow. The couple had six children. Their second child was Rickman Godlee, a neurosurgeon who became Professor of Clinical Surgery at the University College Hospital and surgeon to Queen Victoria. He became Lister's biographer in 1917. The eldest son of Joseph and Isabella Lister was John Lister, who died of a painful brain tumour. With John's death, Joseph became the heir of the family. The couple's second daughter was Isabella Sophia Lister, who married Irish Quaker Thomas Pim in 1848. Lister's other brother William Henry Lister died after a long illness. The youngest son was Arthur Lister, a wine merchant, botanist and lifelong Quaker, who studied Mycetozoa. He worked alongside his daughter Gulielma Lister to produce the standard monograph on Mycetozoa. By 1898, Lister's work had built a reputation sufficient to enable his election to the Royal Society. Gulielma Lister, a talented artist, later updated the standard monograph with colour drawings. Her work built a reputation sufficient to be elected a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1904. She became its vice-president in 1929. The couple's last child was Jane Lister; she married widower Smith Harrison, a wholesale tea merchant.
After their marriage, the Listers lived at 5 Tokenhouse Yard in Central London for three years until 1822, where they ran a port wine business in partnership with Thomas Barton Beck.
Beck was the grandfather of the professor of surgery and proponent of the germ theory of disease, Marcus Beck, who would later promote Lister's discoveries in his fight to introduce antiseptics. In 1822, Lister's family moved to Stoke Newington. In 1826, the family moved to Upton House, a long low Queen Anne style mansion that came with 69 acres of land. It had been rebuilt in 1731, to suit the style of the period.
Education
School
As a child, Lister had a stammer and this was possibly why he was educated at home until he was eleven. Lister then attended Isaac Brown and Benjamin Abbott's Academy, a private Quaker school in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. When Lister was thirteen, he attended Grove House School in Tottenham, also a private Quaker School to study mathematics, natural science, and languages. His father was insistent that Lister received a good grounding in French and German, in the knowledge he would learn Latin at school. From an early age, Lister was strongly encouraged by his father and would talk about his father's great influence later in life, particularly in encouraging him in his study of natural history. Lister's interest in natural history led him to study bones and to collect and dissect small animals and fish that were examined using his father's microscope and then drawn using the camera lucida technique that his father had explained to him, or sketched. His father's interests in microscopical research developed in Lister the determination to become a surgeon and prepared him for a life of scientific research. None of Lister's relatives were in the medical profession. According to Godlee, the decision to become a physician seemed to be an entirely spontaneous decision.In 1843 his father decided to send him to university. As Lister was unable to attend either University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge owing to the religious tests that effectively barred him, he decided to apply to the non-sectarian University College London Medical School, one of only a few institutions in Great Britain that accepted Quakers at that time. Lister took the public examination in the junior class of botany, a required course that would enable him to matriculate. Lister left school in the spring of 1844 when he was seventeen.
University
In 1844, just before Lister's seventeenth birthday, he moved to an apartment at 28 London Road that he shared with Edward Palmer, also a Quaker. Between 1844 and 1845, Lister continued his pre-matriculation studies, in Greek, Latin and natural philosophy. In the Latin and Greek classes, he won a "Certificate of Honour". For the experimental natural philosophy class, Lister won first prize and was awarded a copy of Charles Hutton's "Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy".Although his father wanted him to continue his general education, the university had demanded since 1837, that each student obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree before commencing medical training. Lister matriculated in August 1845, initially studying for a BA in classics. Between 1845 and 1846, Lister studied the mathematics of natural philosophy, mathematics and Greek earning a "Certificate of Honour" in each class. Between 1846 and 1847, Lister studied both anatomy and atomic theory and won a prize for his essay. On 21 December 1846, Lister and Palmer attended Robert Liston's famous operation where ether was applied by Lister's classmate, William Squire to anaesthetise a patient for the first time. On 23 December 1847, Lister and Palmer moved to 2 Bedford Place and were joined by John Hodgkin, the nephew of Thomas Hodgkin who discovered Hodgkin lymphoma. Lister and Hodgkin had been school friends.
In December 1847, Lister graduated with a degree of Bachelor of Arts 1st division, with a distinction in classics and botany. While he was studying, Lister suffered from a mild bout of smallpox, a year after his elder brother died of the disease. The bereavement combined with the stress of his classes led to a nervous breakdown in March 1848. Lister's nephew Godlee used the term to describe the situation and is perhaps indicative that adolescence was just as difficult in 1847, as it is now. Lister decided to take a long holiday to recuperate and this delayed the start of his studies. In late April 1848, Lister visited the Isle of Man with Hodgkin and by 7 June 1848, he was visiting Ilfracombe. At the end of June, Lister accepted an invitation to stay in the home of Thoman Pim, a Dublin Quaker. Using it as his base, Lister travelled throughout Ireland. On 1 July 1848, Lister received a letter full of warmth and love from his father where his last meeting was "...sunshine after a refreshing shower, following a time of cloud" and advised him to "cherish a pious cheerful spirit, open to see and to enjoy the bounties and the beauties spread around us :—not to give way to turning thy thoughts upon thyself nor even at present to dwell long on serious things". From 22 July 1848, for more than a year, the record is blank.