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

Before Lister, half the patients who survived surgery died of infection in the following days. The operating theatres were public spectacles in blood-stiff coats. Fitzharris renders Victorian medicine with a novelist's eye for period detail and a historian's precision about the institutional resistance to germ theory. The suffering was not inevitable. It persisted because medicine was more invested in hierarchy than hygiene.