Books: The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine: Transforming the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

摘要

Lindsey Fitzharris Allen Lane, 2017, HB, 304pp, ￡16.99, 978-0241262498From the start, Lindsey Fitzharris’s account of the life and times of surgeon Joseph Lister gleefully evokes the smells, sights, and sounds of mid-nineteenth century medicine. Surgeons in bloodied aprons used instruments still filthy from previous operations to perform amputations in seconds, slicing through testicles and assistants’ fingers in their haste.Little wonder that operating theatres were known as ‘gateways of death’ as half of those undergoing surgery did not live to tell the tale. …