The Butchering Art

by Lindsey Fitzharris

  “every thing that may incite terror”: Thomas Percival, Medical Jurisprudence; or a Code of Ethics and Institutes, Adapted to the Professions of Physic and Surgery (Manchester, 1794), 16.

  “The actual mortality in hospitals”: Florence Nightingale, Notes on Hospitals, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863), iii.

  “We are going to try”: Quoted in Peter Vinten-Johansen et al., Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 111. See also Richard Hollingham, Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery (London: BBC Books, 2008); Victor Robinson, Victory over Pain: A History of Anesthesia (London: Sigma Books, 1947), 141–50; Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of the Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 180.

  “quiets all suffering”: Quoted in Steve Parker, Kill or Cure: An Illustrated History of Medicine (London: DK, 2013), 174.

  “It has long been”: Henry Jacob Bigelow, “Insensibility During Surgical Operations Produced by Inhalation,” The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, Nov. 18, 1846, 309.

  At six feet two, Liston was: Timothy J. Hatton, “How Have Europeans Grown So Tall?,” Oxford Economic Papers, Sept. 1, 2013.

  “the gleam of his knife”: D’A. Power, “Liston, Robert (1794–1847),” rev. Jean Loudon, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com.

  “Painful methods are always”: John Pearson, Principles of Surgery (Boston: Stimpson & Clapp, 1832), vii.

  The traumas of the operating theater: Myrtle Simpson, Simpson the Obstetrician (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1972), 41, in A. J. Youngson, The Scientific Revolution in Victorian Medicine (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 28.

  The boy asked the surgeon: F. W. Cock, “Anecdota Listoniensa,” University College Hospital Magazine (1911): 55, quoted in Peter Stanley, For Fear of Pain: British Surgery, 1790–1850 (New York: Rodopi, 2002), 313.

  Sixty years later, Pace would: Pace is also mentioned by Liston in his casebooks. See Liston casebook, Dec. 1845–Feb. 1847, UCH/MR/1/61, University College London.

  “fat, plethoric, and with a liver”: Quoted in Harold Ellis, A History of Surgery (London: Greenwich Medical Media, 2001), 85.

  At twenty-five minutes past two: Quoted in Hollingham, Blood and Guts, 59–64.

  An observer in the audience: F. W. Cock, “The First Operation Under Ether in Europe: The Story of Three Days,” University College Hospital Magazine 1 (1911): 127–44.

  Earlier in the century: Charles Bell, Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery (London: Longman, 1821), 62, quoted in Stanley, For Fear of Pain, 83.

  In 1823, Thomas Alcock: Thomas Alcock, “An Essay on the Education and Duties of the General Practitioner in Medicine and Surgery,” Transactions of the Associated Apothecaries and Surgeon Apothecaries of England and Wales (London: Society, 1823), 53, quoted in Stanley, For Fear of Pain, 83.

  His contemporary William Gibson: William Gibson, Institutes and Practice of Surgery (Philadelphia: James Kay, Jun. & Brother, 1841), 504, quoted in Stanley, For Fear of Pain, 83.

  “announcing in enthusiastic terms”: James Miller, Surgical Experience of Chloroform (Edinburgh: Sutherland & Knox, 1848), 7, quoted in Stanley, For Fear of Pain, 295.

  “The history of Medicine has presented”: “Etherization in Surgery,” Exeter Flying Post, June 24, 1847, 4.

  “Oh, what delight for every feeling”: “The Good News from America,” in John Saunders, ed., People’s Journal (London: People’s Journal Office, 1846–[1849?]), Jan. 9, 1847, 25.

  “so horrible and distressing”: T. G. Wilson, Victorian Doctor, Being the Life of Sir William Wilde (London: Methuen, 1942), 90, quoted in Stanley, For Fear of Pain, 174.

  Nor would they feel: South, Memorials of John Flint South, 36.

  Patients worldwide came to further dread: Jerry L. Gaw, “A Time to Heal”: The Diffusion of Listerism in Victorian Britain (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999), 8.

  1. THROUGH THE LENS

  “Let us not overlook”: Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (New York: D. Appleton, 1861), 81–82.

  Once, he plucked a shrimp: Quoted in Sir Rickman John Godlee, Lord Lister, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1918), 28.

  “The baby has been today”: Isabella Lister to Joseph Jackson Lister, Oct. 21, 1827, MS 6963/6, Wellcome Library.

  On the first floor: Richard B. Fisher, Joseph Lister, 1827–1912 (London: MacDonald and Jane’s, 1977), 23.

  Before 1848, no major hospital: Fisher, Joseph Lister, 35.

  “shade another man”: Joseph Lister to Isabella Lister, Feb. 21, 1841, MS 6967/17, Wellcome Library.

  “I got almost all the meat off”: Quoted in Godlee, Lord Lister, 14.

  “It looks just as if”: Ibid.

  His village of Upton: Ibid., 12.

  “folding windows open to the garden”: Ibid., 8.

  “ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork”: John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), 14, in Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 18 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 406.

  Death was a frequent visitor: Descriptions of graveyards come from Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain: A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (London: Printed by Clowes for HMSO, 1843), 134.

  two men purportedly asphyxiated: Story from Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 60.

  For those living near these pits: For further descriptions of Clement’s Lane, see Sarah Wise, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (London: Pimlico, 2005), 52.

  An entire underground army: For more on this subject, see Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead, 2006), 7–9.

  The business conducted elsewhere: For more, see Kellow Chesney, The Victorian Underworld (Newton Abbot: Readers Union Group, 1970), 15–19, 95–97.

  When the young doctor: Letter from Peter Mark Roget to his sister Annette, December 29, 1800. Quoted in D. L. Emblen, Peter Mark Roget: The Word and the Man (London: Longman, 1970), 54.

  The university was part of this: “The London College,” Times, June 6, 1825.

  “The morality of London”: John Bull, Feb. 14, 1825.

  At five feet ten inches: Hatton, “How Have Europeans Grown So Tall?”

  “When I was admitted to the drawing-room”: Hector Charles Cameron, Joseph Lister: The Friend of Man (London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1948), 16.

  Lister was described: Ibid., 16–18.

  “He lived in the world”: Thomas Hodgkin, Remembrance of Lister’s Youth, April 5, 1911, MS 6985/12, Wellcome Library.

  “man in straightened [sic] circumstances”: Ibid.

  In his account books: Cashbook, Oct.–Dec. 1846, MS 6981, Wellcome Library.

  Hodgkin, who was five years: Louise Creighton, Life and Letters of Thomas Hodgkin (London: Longmans, Green, 1917), 12.

  “a very suitable companion”: Ibid., 39.

  “snares which notoriously lie”: John Stevenson Bushnan, Address to the Medical Students of London: Session 1850–1 (London: J. Churchill, 1850), 11, 12.

  “by-word for vulgar riot”: William Augustus Guy, On Medical Education (London: Henry Renshaw, 1846), 23, quoted in Stanley, For Fear of Pain, 167.

  “apt to be lawless, exuberant”: “Medical Education in New York,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Sept. 1882, 672, quoted in Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 83.

  They were often a rough-looking: Stanley, For Fear of Pain, 166. Also described in “Horace Saltoun,” Cornhill Magazine 3, no. 14 (Feb. 1861): 246
.

  “wrought to such a degree”: Advertisement, “Lancets,” Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, Jan. 12, 1778, quoted in Alun Withey, Technology, Self-Fashioning, and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Refined Bodies (London: Palgrave Pivot, 2015), 121.

  Older surgeons preferred the circular: Stanley, For Fear of Pain, 81.

  Robert Liston—who was said: Forbes Winslow, Physic and Physicians: A Medical Sketch Book (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, 1839), 2:362–63.

  “We do not think that the day”: Quoted in Elisabeth Bennion, Antique Medical Instruments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 3.

  By 1788, there were 20,341 patients: Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794–1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 15.

  Because they were often poor: Ibid., 51.

  In the early decades of the nineteenth century: Information sourced from Ann F. La Berge, “Debate as Scientific Practice in Nineteenth-Century Paris: The Controversy over the Microscope,” Perspectives on Science 12, no. 4 (2004): 425–27.

  “spoke of the improvements introduced”: A. E. Conrady, “The Unpublished Papers of J. J. Lister,” Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society 29 (1913): 28–39. This letter is dated 1850, but I wonder if it is misdated, because the “Mr. Potter” he speaks of died in 1847.

  “By compressing a portion”: Joseph Lister, “Observations on the Muscular Tissue of the Skin,” Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 1 (1853): 264.

  Years later, Lister’s supervisor: Quoted in W. R. Merrington, University College Hospital and Its Medical School: A History (London: Heinemann, 1976), 44.

  2. HOUSES OF DEATH

  “What a charming task”: D. Hayes Agnew, Lecture Introductory to the One Hundred and Fifth Course of Instruction in the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, Delivered Monday, October 10, 1870 (Philadelphia: R. P. King’s Sons, 1870), 25, quoted in Sappol, Traffic of Dead Bodies, 75–76.

  Cadavers were left with their incised heads: Dr. John Cheyne to Sir Edward Percival, Dec. 2, 1818, quoted in “Bodies for Dissection in Dublin,” British Medical Journal, Jan. 16, 1943, 74, quoted in Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, 97.

  “Not a sound could be heard”: Quoted in Hale Bellot, Notes on the History of University College, London with a Record of the Session 1886–7: Being the First Volume of the University College Gazette (1887), 37.

  The cadaver tested the courage: J. Marion Sims, The Story of My Life (New York: D. Appleton, 1884), 128–29, quoted in Sappol, Traffic of Dead Bodies, 78–79.

  “as though Death himself”: Quoted in Peter Bloom, The Life of Berlioz (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14.

  Within the medical profession: Robley Dunglison, The Medical Student; or, Aids to the Study of Medicine … (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1837), 150.

  “forced the dead human body”: W. W. Keen, A Sketch of the Early History of Practical Anatomy: The Introductory Address to the Course of Lectures on Anatomy at the Philadelphia School of Anatomy … (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1874), 3, quoted in Sappol, Traffic of Bodies, 77–78.

  It was a rite of passage: Sappol, Traffic of Dead Bodies, 76.

  “Have you finished that leg yet?”: Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Chapter XXX (London: Chapman and Hall, 1868), 253.

  Today, we disparagingly call this: William Hunter, Introductory Lecture to Students (ca. 1780), MS 55.182, St. Thomas’ Hospital.

  The French anatomist Joseph-Guichard Duverney: Patrick Mitchell, Lecture Notes Taken in Paris Mainly from the Lectures of Joseph Guichard Duverney at the Jardin du Roi from 1697–8, MS 6.f.134, Wellcome Library, quoted in Lynda Payne, With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 87.

  Harper’s New Monthly Magazine condemned: “Editor’s Table,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, April 1854, 692.

  “Not a single session has passed”: W. T. Gairdner, Introductory Address at the Public Opening of the Medical Session 1866–67 in the University of Glasgow (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1866), 22, quoted in M. Anne Crowther and Marguerite W. Dupree, Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 45.

  Mortality rates among medical students: Robert Woods, “Physician, Heal Thyself: The Health and Mortality of Victorian Doctors,” Social History of Medicine 9 (1996): 1–30.

  Between 1843 and 1859: “Medical Education,” New York Medical Inquirer 1 (1830): 130, cited in Sappol, Traffic of Dead Bodies, 80.

  “God help you all”: Thomas Pettigrew, Biographical Memoirs of the Most Celebrated Physicians, Surgeons, etc., etc., Who Have Contributed to the Advancement of Medical Science (London: Fisher, Son, 1839–40), 2:4–5, quoted in Stanley, For Fear of Pain, 159. A contemporary claimed that Abernethy added, “What is to become of you?” Winslow, Physic and Physicians, 1:119.

  “hideous traces of its power”: Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), 73.

  His friend and fellow lodger John Hodgkin: See Fisher, Joseph Lister, 40–41.

  “I will be with thee”: Hodgkin, Remembrance of Lister’s Youth.

  “cloud of seriousness”: John Rudd Leeson, Lister as I Knew Him (New York: William Wood, 1927), 58–60.

  Throughout Victoria’s reign: Janet Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 110–11.

  “The things that sometimes distress”: Quoted in Fisher, Joseph Lister, 42. Letter from Joseph Jackson Lister to Joseph Lister, July 1, 1848, MS 6965/7, Wellcome Library.

  These included a bladder: Cashbook, Dec. 1, 1849, MS 6981, Wellcome Library.

  After the first year of medical school: Quoted in Fisher, Joseph Lister, 47. Although there is no direct mention of his mental state during this period, it’s possible that he passed up this opportunity on the advice of his father, who told him to tackle his studies in moderation in light of his breakdown two years earlier.

  The best that can be said: Adrian Teal, The Gin Lane Gazette (London: Unbound, 2014).

  Some only admitted patients: Elisabeth Bennion, Antique Medical Instruments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 13.

  “a soldier has more chance of survival”: James Y. Simpson, “Our Existing System of Hospitalism and Its Effects,” Edinburgh Medical Journal, March 1869, 818.

  In spite of token efforts: Youngson, Scientific Revolution, 23–24.

  In 1825, visitors to St. George’s Hospital: F. B. Smith, The People’s Health, 1830–1910 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 262, cited in Stanley, For Fear of Pain, 139.

  The smell was so offensive: Youngson, Scientific Revolution, 24.

  In England and Wales in the 1840s: Statistic quoted ibid., 40.

  His most successful book: Ibid., 65.

  “It is long since”: John Eric Erichsen, On the Study of Surgery: An Address Introductory to the Course of Surgery, Delivered at University College, London, at the Opening of Session 1850–1851 (London: Taylor, Walton & Maberly, 1850), 8.

  “like a head and trunk”: Quoted in Jacob Smith, The Thrill Makers: Celebrity, Masculinity, and Stunt Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 53.

  Unbeknownst to Barnum: Although Barnum’s first “What Is It?” exhibit was a failure, his follow-up attempt in 1860 was a wild success in the United States. It came on the heels of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, which put the question of the “missing link” into everyone’s mind. Barnum’s second “What Is It?” was an African American man named William Henry Johnson. As the historian Stephen Asma points out, one wonders if the racist dimension of the exhibit played better to an American audience on the cusp of a civil war than it did in England, where slavery had been abolished decades earlier. Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxfo
rd: Oxford University Press, 2009), 138.

  Despite this initial bungle: “John Phillips Potter FRCS,” The Lancet, May 29, 1847, 576.

  “be presented to Dr. Liston”: “Obituary Notices,” South Australian Register, July 28, 1847, 2.

  “bequeathed his body”: “Death from Dissecting,” Daily News (London), May 25, 1847, 3.

  Potter, who had proven himself: “John Phillips Potter FRCS,” 576–77.

  “It seems as though the thigh-bones”: Courier, Oct. 13, 1847, 4. See also “Dissection of the Man Monkey,” Stirling Observer, April 29, 1847, 3.

  “a most melancholy and disheartening instance”: “John Phillips Potter FRCS,” 576.

  His death was felt deeply: Merrington, University College Hospital, 65.

  By the end of the 1840s: Ibid., 49.

  For the first time in his life: Godlee, Lord Lister, 20.

  He also led a scathing attack: Quoted in Fisher, Joseph Lister, 50–51, 307.

  His mother, Isabella, had suffered: Joseph Jackson Lister to Joseph Lister, Oct. 9, 1838, MS 6965/1, Wellcome Library.

  “unreasoned dread of wet feet”: Leeson, Lister as I Knew Him, 48–49.

  “progress in the public practice”: James Y. Simpson, Hospitalism: Its Effects on the Results of Surgical Operations, etc. Part I (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1869), 4.

  “the poison of atmospheric impurity”: Royal Commission for Enquiring into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts, Parliamentary Papers (1844), 17, quoted in Stephen Halliday, “Death and Miasma in Victorian London: An Obstinate Belief,” British Medical Journal, Dec. 22, 2001, 1469–71.

  While many medical practitioners: See Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 28.

  “at any season of the year”: John Eric Erichsen, On Hospitalism and the Causes of Death After Operations (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), 36.

  While comparing mortality rates: James Y. Simpson, Hospitalism: Its Effects on the Results of Surgical Operations, etc. Part II (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1869), 20–24.