According to School History, a website that provides history teaching modules for instructors in the United Kingdom, Joseph Lister was an English surgeon, the first to provide a solution to the problem of wound infection following surgical operations.
He was born on April 5, 1827, the fourth of seven children, in Upton, a village near London. His father, Joseph Jackson Lister, was a prosperous Quaker merchant.
Joseph Lister received his B.A., and then in 1852, his medical degree from the University College of London. He then became assistant to a leading surgeon. Prof. James Syme of the University of Edinburgh.
In 1856 he married Syme’s daughter, Agnes, giving up his religion to do so. It was a very happy marriage, although they were disappointed in not having any children.
In 1860, Lister was appointed Regius Professor at the University of Glasgow. There he found the mortality following surgical operations even higher than in Edinburgh.
At that time surgery was a last resort because of ‘surgical diseases’ which would frequently kill all the patients in a hospital ward. These diseases were usually blamed on gases which presumably hovered about the hospital and caused wounds to rot.
As a student, Lister had examined dangerous material under a microscope, suspecting that something in the wound rather than in the atmosphere caused the disease.
This, along with his subsequent work on the contraction of arteries was related to the subject of his first important scientific work, published in 1857 and entitled ‘An Essay on the Early Stages of Inflammation’.
These studies enabled him to understand a paper by Louis Pasteur which he read in 1865. It proved, among other things that microbes cause decay. Lister applied this theory to wound infection.
He used carbolic acid to kill the germs in several cases of compound fractures, which generally became infected and required amputation. His approach was successful.
In 1867 he published ‘On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery’. His method was not rapidly adopted, mainly due to opposition to the germ theory. However, despite the controversy, his successes and his perseverance could not be ignored.
Within a few years, antiseptic surgery put an end to surgical diseases; new operations could be performed. Modern scientific surgery was born. Later, the antiseptic method was replaced by the aseptic method, the emphasis being shifted from killing germs to keeping them from wounds.
Lister became interested in Pasteur’s work in 1864 in Glasgow, when he came into contact with the microbiologist’s works ‘On the organized bodies which exist in the atmosphere’, published 1861; and in ‘Investigation into the role attributable to atmospheric gas’ (1863).
At the time, Lister was working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and was struck by the amount of people that died following surgical procedures. In fact, people were more susceptible to death because of the ‘cross-infections’ present in the hospitals.
Lister became more and more interested in Pasteur’s work, and started to carry out experiments in order to find out whether he could cure infections caused by germs with antiseptics. In his successful attempts, Lister realized that the study of microorganisms and surgery go hand in hand, since microorganisms can definitely affect the human body and the immune system.
Thanks to Pasteur’s work ‘On the organized bodies which exist in the atmosphere’, Lister came to the conclusion that air in itself is not poisonous: rather, it is the microscopic particles in the air and the minute germs that give a specific quality to the air.
Moreover, Lister was particularly intrigued by a statement made by Pasteur in the scientific magazine Anals of Natural Science (in March and April 1865), in which the French microbiologist drew an analogy between fermentation and the processes of infection.
Lister came to the conclusion that germs could definitely affect and poison the human tissue.
Throughout his experiments, Lister had carefully reproduced Pasteur’s experiments and had made a contribution that sought to eliminate hospital infections.
So who was this Louis Pasteur guy?
Louis Pasteur was born in the market town of Dole in eastern France on December 27, 1822.
His father was Jean-Joseph Pasteur, a decorated former sergeant major in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, who now worked as a tanner. His mother was Jeanne-Etiennette Roqui. Loius had an older sister and two younger sisters.
When Louis was four years old his family moved to the nearby town of Arbois. He started school at age eight at the École Primaire Arbois – it was actually a single room in the town hall. He could already read, having been taught by his father.
In 1844, at the age of 21, he entered the École Normale Supérieure, a teachers college in Paris.
In 1845 he earned his science degree. Fortunately, a chemistry professor at the college by the name of Antoine Jérome Balard had liked what he’d seen of Pasteur.
Balard was an eminent scientist, famed for his discovery of the element bromine in 1826. He offered Pasteur work as a chemistry graduate assistant along with the opportunity to carry out research for a doctorate.
According to his biography by the Science History Institute, in1857 Louis Pasteur took a position with the École Normale college as director of scientific studies.
In the modest laboratory that he was permitted to establish there, he continued his study of fermentation.
His studies centered around various applications of his pasteurization process, which he originally invented and patented (in 1865) to fight the “diseases” of wine.
He realized that these were caused by unwanted microorganisms that could be destroyed by heating wine to a temperature between 60° and 100°C. The process was later extended to all sorts of other spoilable substances, such as milk.
At the same time Pasteur began his fermentation studies, he adopted a related view on the cause of diseases. He and a minority of other scientists believed that diseases arose from the activities of microorganisms—germ theory.
Opponents believed that diseases, particularly major killer diseases, arose in the first instance from a weakness or imbalance in the internal state and quality of the afflicted individual.
Pasteur disagreed and wanted to move into the more difficult areas of human disease. He looked for a disease that afflicts both animals and humans so that most of his experiments could be done on animals, although here too he had strong reservations.
Rabies, the disease he chose, had long terrified the populace, even though it was in fact quite rare in humans. Up to the time of Pasteur’s vaccine, a common treatment for a bite by a rabid animal had been cauterization with a red-hot iron in hopes of destroying the unknown cause of the disease, which almost always developed anyway after a typically long incubation period.
As a child, his village in rural France had been terrorized by rabid wolves.
A church bell would ring and everyone would lock themselves inside until the wolves were killed of simply left.
Most human victims of rabies died a painful death and the disease appeared to be getting more and more common in France.
Pasteur vowed that one day he would find a cure for the disease, so when he finally became a famous scientist with access to a lab, he spent his free time in the evenings, trying to find a cure.
Though he could not identify the germ, he did find that the rabies germ attacked the nervous system only after it had made its way to the brain.
He traced the germ to the brain and spinal cord of infected animals and by using dried spinal cords, he produced a vaccine for rabies.
It is interesting to note that one of the biggest problems he had was finding and keeping a live rabies virus long enough to experiment on it before its host died.
He solved this problem by infecting rabbits, then dogs.
As the rabid animal began to decline, he would introduce a healthy animal to the cage, and it would then be infected.
Now what is interesting was that he needed to examine the spinal cord of a rabies infected live dog. He could not bring himself to do this, even though he suspected it would prove his theory that this was a neurological virus.
He told his assistant that he could not bring himself to operate on the dog and when Pasteur left for the evening, the assistant took it upon himself to do the operation.
The next morning he told Pasteur, who was horrified. However, the samples taken proved the theory.
The first vaccine was now tried out on animals.
Pasteur injected ‘clean’ animals with the rabies germ found in a spinal cord that was fourteen days old. At this age, the germ was relatively weak and unlikely to threaten the life of the animals.
He then used spinal cords that were thirteen days old, twelve days etc. on the animals until they were injected with the most virulent germ found in infected spinal cord that was fresh.
All of the dogs survived this. But Pasteur faced a serious problem. What worked on animals might not work on humans.
In 1885, a young boy, Joseph Meister, who lived in the village Pasteur grew up in, had been bitten by a rabid dog, and was brought to Pasteur by his mother who was hysterical with grief.
They had come by carriage to Paris as fast as they could, but a lot of time had passed.
The mother had heard of Pasteur’s experiments and begged him to try it on her dying son.
The boy almost certainly would have died an agonising death if nothing was done so Pasteur took the risk of using his untested vaccine.
Pasteur then gave the boy a series of 13 shots over 13 days with each shot introducing a stronger form of the rabies virus.
The boy survived and Pasteur knew that he had found a vaccine for rabies.
How about one final medical breakthrough?
William TG Morton was a Boston dentist who experimented trying to discover a painkiller in 1846.
Martin hired an assistant named Spears who he used as a guinea pig.
Morton came up with Ethyl Ether which was a mixture of grain alcohol and sulfuric acid.
He would have Spears sniff the concoction that he put in a bowl until he got high.
Spears was the town drunk.
Morton was afraid he would kill Spears so he now experimented on his dog.
He increase the dose to his dog each time until the dog passed out. The dog survived but Morton was afraid he’d kill his dog so he now experimented on himself.
The first time he tried it he was out for eight minutes.
He now created a chart by sitting with a stopwatch inhaling more and more of the ether and recording how long he was out.
On September 30, 1846 a patient with a toothache came to Martin’s office begging that it tooth be removed.
Martin told the man about his experiment and the guy was willing to try it.
Morton gave him the ether and the man passed out. Morton now removed the tooth.
He looked at the chart and saw the man should wake up in five minutes. He did not.
At 10 minutes he was still out. At 20 minutes he was still out. One hour passed and the man was still out.
Morton now feared he had killed the man. After one hour and 15 minutes the man came to and was thrilled that his pain was gone and he remembered nothing.
Morton now went back to his chart and tried to figure out what happened. It finally dawned on him that he weighed nearly 300 pounds and his patient weighed 120.
So he now adjusted the chart for weight.
In October 1846 Morton demonstrated his discovery at the Massachusetts General Hospital and it was a complete success.
So there you have it folks. Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, and William Morton. Three medical pioneers who stepped up to the plate in times of human suffering.
As we battle our current fight with Corona Virus, let’s not forget our history and know that the next generation of pioneers are out there, right now, seeking the answers to our current dilemma.