Joseph Lister: biography of this British surgeon and researcher.

Summary of the life of Joseph Lister, one of the most influential researchers in medicine.

Throughout the 19th century, surgery was a life and death gamble. Antisepsis was unknown and even scorned, as many physicians considered that washing hands or cleaning surgical instruments was unnecessary, even offensive to be asked to do such a thing.

Fortunately, this has changed, although it would not have been possible without the influence of great figures such as Joseph Lister. This English physician realized the great need to sterilize both the operating room and the instruments to be used in order to avoid the enormous number of deaths associated with nineteenth-century operations.

In this biography of Joseph Lister we will discover the life of this British surgeon, his main findings and the transcendence of his work.

Brief biography of Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister, was a British surgeon well known thanks to his findings in antiseptic techniques and his awareness of the importance of maintaining proper hygiene and sterilization in operating rooms. This English physician realized that surgical wounds would eventually rot if they were not properly sanitized before and after the operation, guaranteeing the death of the patient from the infection.This would guarantee the death of the patient due to septicemia.

Aware of this, he introduced several antiseptic techniques in the operating rooms, in addition to imposing the nowadays standardized habit of hand washing, an original idea of the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweiss. Although Lister abused a little of carbolic acid, better known today as phenol, a rather toxic substance, it must be said that it was a good sterilizer in its time and worked to prevent the death of thousands of people, causing a real revolution in the field of surgery.

Early years

Joseph Lister was born on April 5, 1827 into a prosperous Quaker family in Upton, Essex, England.. His parents were Joseph Jackson Lister and Isabella Harris. His father was a wine merchant who had an extensive knowledge of physics and mathematics and was also fond of microscopy and optics, being one of the first builders of achromatic lenses.

Lister studied at University College, London, one of the few institutions that admitted Quakers at that time. He initially studied botany and graduated in 1847. Later enrolled in the study of medicine, obtaining his degree with honors and, at the age of 26, was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons of England.. In 1854 he trained as an official surgeon in Edinburgh, together with Jarnes Syme, whose daughter he married. In the Scottish capital he devoted himself to various anatomical, physiological and pathological works.

Beginnings in surgery

In 1860 he went to Glasgow where he replaced Syme and developed his most extensive work. When he took charge of the surgical clinic in that city, Joseph Lister had to face what was one of the main problems of surgery at the time: 30 to 50% of the patients admitted eventually died from hospital gangrene, erysipelas, pyaemia or purulent oedema..

Entering an operating room in the 19th century was a gamble of life or death. Although with the invention of anesthesia the operating rooms had become quieter, without the agonizing screams of patients, postoperative illnesses ended up taking almost half of those operated on.

The usual procedure to avoid infections consisted of ventilating the hospital wards to expel the miasmas, the bad air that at that time was so common in the hospital.The usual procedure to avoid infections was to ventilate the hospital wards to expel the miasmas, the bad air that at that time was believed to be exhaled by the wounds and to spread diseases to other patients. This was the only hygienic habit practiced by the surgeons of the time because, as surprising as it may seem to us today, they loved the putrid stench of the hospitals of the time.

Doctors would arrive at the operating room in their street clothes and, without even washing their hands, would put on their gowns covered with dried Blood and pus, seen as medals as proof of the many operations they had performed.

The success of the operations was rather scarce, a fact known to all surgeons as it was their daily bread. It was for this reason that even the surgeons surgeons themselves were reluctant to operate unless absolutely necessary, and in fact, the problem of infections was so serious and, in fact, the problem of infections was so serious that there was even talk of abolishing surgery in hospitals. It was preferable for the patient to die on his own rather than cause an agonizing and undignified death caused by the symptoms of septicemia.

But Jospeh Lister was not convinced by the miasma theory, for he observed that, by cleaning the wounds, he sometimes succeeded in containing the infections.. The problem must not be in the air, but rather in the sore itself. Like other surgeons in the past, Lister wanted to rebel against the doctrine of praiseworthy pus, the one that held that pus was a positive sign of wound healing far from being an indication of infection and health risk. Lister confronted this doctrine, but he did so in a different way. He thought that wound infection and pus formation were equated with putrefaction.

Lister was aware of the ideas and work of Louis Pasteur. On the one hand, he knew that the French bacteriologist had demonstrated that putrefaction was due to the arrival of living germs to putrescible matter, and on the other hand, that this same matter could be preserved unaltered if it was kept out of contact with air or if it was filtered. Lister related these notions to his experience in the field of surgery, especially in cases of fractures.

Discovery of the power of antisepsis

Joseph Lister had observed that simple fractures, those in which there was no wound, healed without too much trouble.while open or complex fractures usually ended with suppuration and infection. He thought that atmospheric air was responsible, because it introduced germs into the injured person's body. His conclusion: it had to be filtered somehow.

Lister tried several alternatives: zinc chloride, sulfites... until he came across carbolic acid, nowadays better known as phenol, a substance easily obtained from coal tar and which, since 1859, had been used to prevent putrefaction. Joseph Lister knew that carbolic acid had been used in the United Kingdom to prevent the stench of the sewage pipes and that in the fields where the water with this substance flowed, the entozoa that parasitized the cattle disappeared..

In 1867 he published a paper entitled "On a new method of treating compound fracture, abscess, etc. with observations on the conditions of suppuration", which had little resonance in the scientific community. He then presented the results of a new study on the subject to the British Medical Association. This material was eventually published in book form in 1867 under the title "On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of the Surgery".

Between the first publication and the second he improved his technique. He first applied compresses of phenylated water and then sprayed this substance both on the objects and in the air of the room where he was going to perform his operations, completing the sterilization with the use of phenylated ointments on the wound. Any measure seemed too little to ensure that no germ would infect the patient's surgical wound..

Successes in his career in medicine

Little by little he accumulated a series of successful cases, the result of continuous experience. In 1867 he decided to operate on a patient with a fractured tibia using his novel antiseptic method. Normally, most cases ended in tragedy. However, Lister managed to cure the patient with his method without any problems. the beginning of what some call "listerism", a trend that quickly began to gain followers..

Important figures in surgery and medicine of the time were deeply interested in the antisepsis proposed by Joseph Lister: in Italy, Antonio Bottini; in Germany, Richard von Volkmann and Karl Thiersch; in France, Lucas Championnière; and in Spain, Salvador Cardenal, Antonio Morales Pérez, Miguel Fargas, Nicolás Ferrer and Juan Aguilar y Lara.

However, there were also great figures of his time who did not take him seriously nor were they convinced by his ideas. Among them was R. Lawson Tait, from Birmingham, who went so far as to say that antisepsis was a useless complication for surgeries, although evidence would eventually make him change his mind.

Knowing the value of statistics to give force to his arguments, Lister accumulated facts and figures.. By 1870 he presented his results regarding amputations. Before the use of their antiseptic techniques, mortality was close to 50% of the patients who underwent surgery, while after the use of these techniques it dropped to 15%. Death

Joseph Lister died on February 10, 1912 at the age of 84, having received all kinds of honors, tributes and recognition for his work. Although at first he aroused all kinds of criticism and skepticism, his antisepsis would end up being one of the three great discoveries that would provoke the revolution in surgery, along with anesthesia and hemostasis.. His funeral was held in Westminster Abbey, where his effigy was engraved next to those of John Hunter and Francis Willis.

Honors and recognitions.

Although from our modern point of view hygiene and sterilization are essential aspects prior to surgery, this was not the case in the 19th century. It was therefore a visionary idea that Joseph Lister had the idea that in order to guarantee the success of operations and a safe postoperative period, it was necessary to clean hands and surgical instruments, in addition to making sure that the room was as clean as possible.

Despite the initial skepticism to his proposals, it was only a matter of time before the results backed up his method, saving thousands of lives and making thousands of patients safer.The results saved thousands of lives and earned Lister several honors, which we mention below:

• 1883: he is appointed baronet of Park Crescent, in Marylebone (Middlesex).
• 1897: awarded the title of Baronet of Lyme Regis
• 1902: received the Order of Merit.
• 1895-1900: serves as president of the Royal Society.
• 1910: the National Autonomous University of Mexico awarded him the Honoris Causa.
• The genus Listeria is named after him.
• The product "Listerine" is named in his honor.

Its surname has been registered as the name of a genus of microorganisms of the family Corynebacteriaceae, order Eubacteriales: Listeria.order Eubacteriales: Listeria. The microorganisms belonging to this genus are gram-positive coccoid and bacillary, which are usually found in animals and cause septicemia. It can also infect humans causing an upper respiratory tract disease with lymphadenitis and conjunctivitis, and also septicemia that can cause encephalitis.

As a final curiosity, the product Listerine, a well-known oral antiseptic, is named in his honor. Joseph Lister was not its inventor, nor did he benefit from it, but it is worth mentioning that it could not have been invented had he not discovered the importance of sterilizing wounds and human tissues to prevent infection.