Lord Lister Remembers - Slides

Lord Lister's Boyhood home

Lord Lister's father: Joseph Jackson Lister

First Operation in England Under Anaesthesia

Joseph Lister (top left) watches in 1846, the first operation in England, under anaesthesia. The surgeon is Robert Liston.

James Syme, Professor of Surgery, University of Edinburgh

Lord Lister's Early Work in Experimental Pathology

Lister’s experiments--his drawing of pus cells.

Lister’s experiments--his drawing of experimental thrombosis

Lister's Wife: Agnes Lister nee Syme

Louis Pasteur

Lord Lister Remembers M. Pasteur's Work on Germs: “But when it had been shown by the researchers of Pasteur that the septic property of the atmosphere depended, not upon the oxygen or any gaseous constituent, but on minute organisms suspended in it, which owed their energy to their vitality, it occurred to me that decomposition of the injured part might be avoided without excluding the air, by applying as a dressing some material capable of destroying the life of the floating particles.”

Lord Lister's Work on Fractures

Osteomyelitis --bone infection--from the Department of Pathology Royal Infirmary Glasgow. Such infections could result from compound fractures.

James G., aged 11 years, was admitted into the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, on the 12th of August, 1865, with compound fracture of the left leg, caused by the wheel of an empty cart passing over the limb a little below its middle. The wound, which was an inch and a half long, and three-quarters of an inch broad, was close to, but not over, the line of a fracture of the tibia. A probe, however, could be passed beneath the integument over the seat of fracture and for some inches beyond it. Very little blood had been extravasated into the tissues. My house-surgeon, Dr. Macfee, acting under my instructions, laid a piece of lint dipped in liquid carbolic acid upon the wound, and applied lateral pasteboard splints padded with cotton wool, the limb resting its outer side, with the knee bent. It was left undisturbed for four days, when, the boy complaining of some uneasiness, I removed the inner splint and examined the wound. It showed no signs of suppuration.  Lister

Lord Lister's work with carbolic acid.

Florence Nightingale

An early X ray

Obstructed Labour

Henry Havelock Chown

Henry Havelock Chown, who studied with Lister, and later became Dean of Medicine in the University of Manitoba. [For more information on the history of medicine in Manitoba please see "Hippocrates on the Red"]

Lord Lister's Opinion on Animal Experimentation

“There are people who do not object to eating a mutton chop – people who do not even object to shooting a pheasant with the considerable chance that it may be only wounded and may have to die after lingering in pain, unable to obtain its proper nutriment – and yet consider it something monstrous to introduce under the skin of a guinea-pig a little inoculation of some microbe to ascertain its action. These seem to me to be most inconsistent views. With regard to all matters with which we are concerned in this world, everything depends upon the motive.

And so it is with the necessary experiments upon lower animals. If they were made, as some people seem to assume, for the mere sport of the thing, they would be indeed to be deprecated and decried; but if they are made with the wholly noble object of not only increasing human knowledge, but also diminishing human suffering, then I hold that these investigations are deserving of all praise.

The profession to which I have the great honor to belong is, I firmly believe, on the average, the most humane of all professions. The medical student may be sometimes a rough diamond; but when he comes to have personal charge of patients, and to have the life and health of a fellow-creature depending upon his individual care, he becomes a changed man, and from that day forth his life becomes a constant exercise of beneficence."

Lister

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