How Joseph Lister’s Visionary Approach Changed Modern Medicine
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, surgery was nothing more than butchering services provided by barbers or people with no formal medical training (some were even illiterate), which performed tooth extractions, bloodletting, enemas, and amputations without a thorough understanding of either human anatomy or infection causes. No wonder hospitals were called Houses of Death, where mushrooms and maggots thrived in dirty sheets and, sometimes, the flesh of patients. Most patients were tortured in surgeries until they died or miraculously survived. As there were no …