The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest To Transform The Grisly World Of Victorian Medicine Quotes
"Science is itself poetic... the poetry of their subjects." - Herbert Spencer
"The baby has been today unusually lovely." - Isabella Lister
"Life was a gift to be employed in honoring God and helping one’s neighbor, not in the pursuit of frivolities."
"Most lenses caused distortion... Joseph Jackson toiled to fix this flaw."
"The microscope... regarded with suspicion by those within the medical community."
"By seeing and practicing on dead bodies, we lose foolish tenderness."
"The deadhouse dismaying to the uninitiated."
"The surgeon was very much viewed as a manual laborer."
"In the midst of all this grime and muck, the city’s citizens were trying to make improvements."
"Surgery was still a manual craft. It was a matter of technique, not technology."
"The amputation knife assumed an almost mythical place in the surgeon’s kit."
"Instruments like the amputation knife of Lister’s student days were havens for bacteria."
"The microscope's revelations led to the effective treatment of patients."
"Julia Sullivan was lucky... she was placed in Lister's care."
"The Old Bailey was the most feared theater of justice in the country."
"Contagionists were vague about the agent by which disease was passed."
"The dead human body... disclose its secrets for the benefit of the living."
"The ability to divorce oneself emotionally came to characterize the mind-set of the medical community."
"The sick often languished in filth... in Victorian hospitals."
"We should ask ourselves, whether, placed under similar circumstances, we should choose to submit to the pain and danger we are about to inflict." - Sir Astley Cooper
"Dust does not kill suddenly, but settles, year after year, a little more firmly into the lungs, until at length a case of plaster is formed."
"The cries of the sufferers are the same in the night as in the day-time; they are exhausted in the course of a week and die."
"Without the circle of infected walls men are safe."
"The only passport togainingadmissionto gaining admissiontogainingadmission should be poverty and disease."
"I feel giddy; would it not be foolish in me to persevere to-day?"
"If the love of surgery is a proof of a person’s being adapted for it, then certainly I am fitted to be a surgeon."
"I shall not have, as in London, to fight with jealous rivals, and contend or join ingloriously with quacks."
"Everywhere questions arose; everything remained without explanation; all was doubt and difficulty."
"Had it not been for the amount of original observation of which they bore evidence, I could not have placed you in the honours list at all."
"We had, as you know, a nasty time of it ... not so much from the actual mortality, as from the vast amount of sickness."
"A certain amount of inflammation as caused by direct irritation is essential to primary union."
"Inflammation of a wound did not necessarily presage sepsis."
"Inflammation could be directly affected by the central nervous system."
"Lister believed that there were two kinds of inflammations: local and nervous."
"These early studies were crucial to Lister’s future clinical work on the healing of wounds and the effects of infection on tissues."
"The surgeon is like the husbandman, who having sown his field, waits with resignation for what the harvest may bring."
"I am ready to ask what new points render requisite still further experiments with the poor frogs."
"Every patient, even the most degraded, should be treated with the same care and regard as though he were the Prince of Wales himself."
"It is a common observation that, when some injury is received without the skin being broken, the patient invariably recovers."
"No Scientific subject can be so important to Man as that of his own life."
"Medical disputes are the inevitable accidents of scientific progress. They are like storms which purify the atmosphere; we must be resigned to them."
"As I have already endeavoured to place the matter in its true light without doing injustice to anyone, I must forbear from any comment on [Simpson’s] allegations."
"Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil."
"Nature is here regarded as some murderous hag, whose fiendish machinations must be counteracted."
"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common."
"What a curious nervous feeling I had just now; I felt as if I wanted to speak and could not."
"Little, if any faith, is placed by any enlightened or experienced surgeon on this side of the Atlantic in the so-called treatment of Professor Lister."
"Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray."
"If seeing was believing, Lister was creating a group of disciples: men who would graduate and spread his ideas beyond the narrow confines of the university."
"The germ theory of putrefaction is the foundation of the whole system of antisepsis."
"Gentlemen, I am the only man who has ever stuck a knife into the Queen!"
"It is a perfect enigma to me that you can devote yourself to researches which demand so much care, time and incessant painstaking, at the same time as you devote yourself to the profession of surgery and to that of chief surgeon to a great hospital."
"If I turn to London, and ask how instruction in clinical surgery is conducted there, I find that not only according to my own experience as a London student... but also from the universal testimony of foreigners who visit there and then come here, it is, when compared with our system here, a mere sham."
"A large portion of American surgeons seem not to have adopted your practice; whether from a lack of confidence or for other reasons, I cannot say."
"Anything that leads a man to think it a matter of indifference whether he writes or tells a lie is most pernicious; he comes to write lies afterwards with the same indifference."
"The welfare of our school is so intimately bound up with your presence, we would yet earnestly hope that the day may never come when your name will cease to be associated with that of the Edinburgh Medical School."
"Gone were the filthy wards crammed with patients wasting away in squalid conditions; gone were the bloodied aprons and the operating tables soiled with bodily fluids; and gone were the unwashed instruments, all of which once had the operating theater reeking of 'good old hospital stink.' The Royal Infirmary was now bright, clean, and well ventilated. No longer a house of death, it was a house of healing."