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Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Lindsey Fitzharris, "The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine" (Scientific American, 2017)
Description: Joseph Lister changed the world of medicine. In her book The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (Scientific American, 2017), Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris explores the gruesome world of surgery in the 19th century. At this time even a successful surgeries had extremely high mortality rates due to persistent infections. Hospitals were terrifying places filled with death and anyone who could afford it opted to have surgeries in their own home.It is in this world that a Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister changed medicine forever. Lister bought into germ theory an...