Lindsey Fitzharris Allen Lane, 2017, HB, 304pp, £16.99, 978-0241262498
From the start, Lindsey Fitzharris’s account of the life and times of surgeon Joseph Lister gleefully evokes the smells, sights, and sounds of mid-nineteenth century medicine. Surgeons in bloodied aprons used instruments still filthy from previous operations to perform amputations in seconds, slicing through testicles and assistants’ fingers in their haste.
Little wonder that operating theatres were known as ‘gateways of death’ as half of those undergoing surgery did not live to tell the tale. …