In 1861, he received the position of surgeon at the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow, Scotland.
It is believed that the method was soon widely used in Germany, especially Munich and after Lister was appointed Professor of Surgery in London’s King’s College Hospital in 1877, English doctors could also be convinced.
When he read in Recherches sur la putrefaction that fermentation was due to germs, microbes invisible to the eye, he sensed that the same cause could explain the infection of wounds.
He also carried out the first operation of a fresh patella fracture under antiseptic conditions in 1877, having just been called from Glasgow to London, and thus began antiseptic bone surgery together with his former Glasgow colleague Sir Hector C. Cameron.
His discovery helped decrease deaths in his hospital ward during 4 years to 15 percent. After microscopic studies (Lister became a member of the Royal Microscopical Society), he recognised the inadequacy of silk and thread as sutures; he introduced the surgical use of catgut thread. He toured Germany and America, lecturing on the importance of antiseptics and was generally received with respect and admiration in medical capitals, and particularly throughout Germany, where surgeons were much more accepting of his techniques than in the primarily English-speaking countries he visited. Wangensteen OH. Carbolic acid was a favored compound, removing the unpleasant smells without apparent ill effects on grazing cattle.4,5, Lister made the connection between the stench of human waste and gangrene and the potential of carbolic acid to function as a disinfectant, and so he began to use carbolic acid in dressings in patients with open fractures.
In his attempt to interpose an antiseptic barrier between the wound and the air, he protected the site of operation from infection by the surgeon’s hands and instruments. His success rate for survival was very high. Lister J. The managers hoped that hospital disease (now known as operative sepsis—infection of the blood by disease-producing microorganisms) would be greatly decreased in their new building.
Credit: Wellcome Images In 1864, while practicing as a professor of surgery at the University of Glasgow, Lister discovered the work of a French chemist named Louis Pasteur. And we have Listerine. He retired from surgical practice in 1893, after the death of his wife in the previous year. Thus, the entire success of his operation carried out under antiseptic conditions forced surgical opinion throughout the world to accept that his method had added greatly to the safety of operative surgery.
The editor of the magazine Medical Record wrote: “We are likely to be as much ridiculed in the next century for our blind belief in the power of unseen germs, as our forefathers were for their faith in the influence of spirits, of certain planets and the like, inducing certain maladies.”.
But Lister was not convinced by the theory of miasmas.
Joseph Lister was born on the 5th of April 1827 in Upton, Essex to a Quaker family. Just six years later, the same journal published an article denouncing Lister. Thomas Gariepy, CSC, professor and chair of healthcare administration, Stonehill College, Easton, MA: “Antiseptic surgery…fostered the alliance between science and medicine.”14. After his beloved wife’s death in 1893, however, his work lost its lustre and he retired, ceasing to write, and he passed away on February 10th 1912. It entailed the deliberate conversion of a simple fracture, carrying no risk to life, into a compound fracture, which often resulted in generalized infection and death.