1.
THROUGH THE LENS
Let us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic.… Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects.
—HERBERT SPENCER
LITTLE JOSEPH LISTER STOOD ON his toes and put his eye to the ocular lens of his father’s latest compound microscope. Unlike the foldaway versions that tourists tucked in their pockets and carried with them on trips to the seaside, the instrument before him was something altogether grander. It was sleek, handsome, powerful: a symbol of scientific progress.
The very first time he looked down the barrel of a microscope, Lister marveled at the intricate world that had previously been hidden from his sight. He delighted in the fact that the objects he could observe under the magnifying lens were seemingly infinite. Once, he plucked a shrimp from the sea and watched in awe at “the heart beating very rapidly” and “the aorta pulsating.” He noticed how the blood slowly circulated through the surface of the limbs and over the back of the heart as the creature wriggled under his gaze.
Lister was born on April 5, 1827, to no fanfare. Six months later, though, his mother gushed to her husband in a letter, “The baby has been today unusually lovely.” He was the couple’s fourth child and second son, one of seven children to be born to Joseph Jackson Lister and his wife, Isabella, two devout Quakers.
Lister had plenty of opportunities to explore miniature worlds with the microscope while he was growing up. Simplicity was the Quaker way of life. Lister wasn’t allowed to hunt, participate in sports, or attend the theater. Life was a gift to be employed in honoring God and helping one’s neighbor, not in the pursuit of frivolities. Because of this, many Quakers turned to scientific endeavors, one of the few pastimes allowed by their faith. It was not uncommon to find among those even in modest circumstances an intellectual man of high scientific attainments.
Lister’s father exemplified this. At the age of fourteen, he left school and became an apprentice to his own father, a wine merchant. Although many Quakers abstained from consuming alcohol in the Victorian period, their faith did not explicitly forbid it. The Lister family’s business was centuries old, begun at a time when teetotalism among Quakers hadn’t yet gained popularity. Joseph Jackson became a partner in his father’s wine business, but it was his discoveries in optics that would earn him worldwide renown during Lister’s childhood. He had first become interested in the subject as a young boy when he discovered that a bubble trapped in the window glass of his own father’s study acted as a simple magnifier.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most microscopes were sold as gentlemen’s toys. They were housed in expensive cases lined with plush velvet. Some were mounted on square wooden bases that contained accessory drawers holding extra lenses, rods, and fittings that more often than not went unused. Most makers supplied their wealthy clients with a set of prepared slides of animal bone sections, fish scales, and delicate flowers. Very few people who purchased a microscope during this period did so for serious scientific purposes.
Joseph Jackson Lister was an exception. Between 1824 and 1843, he became a great devotee of the instrument and set out to correct many of its defects. Most lenses caused distortion due to light of different wavelengths being diffracted at various angles through glass. This produced a purple halo around the object in view: an effect that led many to distrust the microscope’s revelations. Joseph Jackson toiled to fix this flaw and in 1830 showcased his achromatic lens, which eliminated the distracting halo. While engaged with his own business, Joseph Jackson somehow found time to grind lenses himself and supply the mathematical calculations necessary for their manufacture to some of the leading makers of microscopes in London. His work earned him a fellowship in the Royal Society in 1832.
On the first floor of little Lister’s childhood home was the “museum,” a room filled with hundreds of fossils and other specimens that various members of the family had collected over the years. His father insisted that each of his children read to him in the mornings while he dressed. Their library consisted of a collection of religious and scientific tomes. One of Joseph Jackson’s earliest gifts to his son was a four-volume book called Evenings at Home; or, The Juvenile Budget Opened, which contained fables, fairy tales, and natural history.
Lister escaped many of the dangerous medical treatments that some of his contemporaries experienced while growing up, because his father believed in vis medicatrix naturae, or “the healing power of nature.” Like many Quakers, Joseph Jackson was a therapeutic nihilist, adhering to the idea that Providence played the most important role in the healing process. He believed that administering foreign substances to the body was unnecessary and sometimes downright life-threatening. In an age when most medicinal concoctions contained highly toxic drugs like heroin, cocaine, and opium, Joseph Jackson’s ideas might not have been too wide of the mark.
Because of the household’s dearly held principles, it came as a surprise to everyone in the family when young Lister announced that he wanted to be a surgeon—a job that involved physically intervening in God’s handiwork. None of his relations, except a distant cousin, were doctors. And surgery, in particular, carried with it a certain social stigma even for those outside the Quaker community. The surgeon was very much viewed as a manual laborer who used his hands to make his living, much like a key cutter or plumber today. Nothing better demonstrated the inferiority of surgeons than their relative poverty. Before 1848, no major hospital had a salaried surgeon on its staff, and most surgeons (with the exception of a notable few) made very little money from their private practices.
But the impact a medical career might have on his social and financial standing later in life was far from Lister’s mind when he was a boy. During the summer of 1841, at the age of fourteen, he wrote to his father, who was away attending to the family’s wine business, “When Mamma was out I was by myself and had nothing to do but draw skeletons.” Lister requested a sable brush so that he could “shade another man to shew the rest of the muscles.” He drew and labeled all the bones in the cranium, as well as those of the hands, from both the front and the back. Like his father, young Lister was a proficient artist—a skill that would later help him to document in startling detail his observations made during his medical career.
Lister was also preoccupied with a sheep’s head that summer of 1841 and in the same letter declared, “I got almost all the meat off; and I think all the brains out … [before] putting it into the macerating tub.” He did this to soften the remaining tissue on the skull. Later, he had managed to articulate the skeleton of a frog he had dissected after stealing a piece of wood from his sister’s cabinet drawer onto which he anchored the creature. He wrote to his father with glee, “It looks just as if [the frog] was going to take a leap,” adding, conspiratorially, “Do not tell Mary about the piece of wood.”
Whatever Joseph Jackson Lister’s reservations were about the medical profession, it was clear that his son would soon be joining its professional ranks.
* * *
LISTER FOUND HIMSELF very far away from the life he had known as a child when he began his studies at University College London (UCL) at the age of seventeen. His village of Upton had a mere 12,738 inhabitants. Although only ten miles from the city, Upton could only be reached by horse and buggy trundling along the muddy tracks that passed for roads at that time. An oriental bridge crossed a stream that flowed through the Listers’ garden, in which there were apple, beech, elm, and chestnut trees. His father wrote of the “folding windows open to the garden; and the temperate warmth and stillness, and the chirping of birds and hum of insects, the bright lawn and aloe and the darker spread of the cedars and chequered sky above.”
In contrast to the vivid colors of the lush gardens surrounding Upton House, London was blocked out in a palette of gray. The art critic John Ruskin called it a “ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore.” Garbage was habitually heaped outside houses, some of which had no doors because the poor often used them as fuel for their grates during the winter months. Roads and alleyways were soiled with manure from the thousands of saddled horses, carts, omnibuses, and hansom cabs that rattled through the city each day. Everything—from the buildings to the people—was covered in a layer of soot.
Within the space of a hundred years, London’s population soared from one million to just over six million inhabitants in the nineteenth century. The wealthy left the city in search of greener pastures, leaving behind grand homes that soon fell into disrepair as they were appropriated by the masses. Single rooms might contain thirty or more people of all ages clad in soiled rags and squatting, sleeping, and defecating in straw-filled billets. The extremely poor were forced to live in “cellar homes,” permanently shut off from sunlight. The rats gnawed at the faces and fingers of malnourished infants, many of whom died in these dark, fetid, and damp surroundings.
Death was a frequent visitor to London’s inhabitants, and disposing of the deceased was a growing problem. Churchyards were bursting at the seams with human remains, posing huge threats to public health. It was not uncommon to see bones projecting from freshly turned ground. Bodies were crammed on top of one another in graves, most of which were merely open pits with row after row of coffins. At the beginning of the century, two men purportedly asphyxiated on gases emanating from decomposing bodies after they fell twenty feet to the bottom of a burial pit.
For those living near these pits, the smell was unbearable. The houses on Clement’s Lane in East London backed onto the local churchyard, which oozed with putrid slime; the stench was so overpowering that occupants kept their windows shut all year long. Children attending the local Sunday school at Enon Chapel could not escape this unpleasantness. They were given their lessons as flies buzzed around them, no doubt originating from inside the church’s crypt, which was stuffed with twelve thousand rotting corpses.
Arrangements for the disposal of human waste were equally rudimentary before the passing of the Public Health Act in 1848, which established the centralized General Board of Health and initiated a sanitarian revolution. Before then, many streets in London were effectively open sewers, releasing powerful (and often deadly) amounts of methane. In the worst housing developments, lines of domiciles known as “back-to-backs” were separated only by narrow passageways four to five feet wide. Trenches brimming with piss ran down the middle. Even the increased number of water closets between 1824 and 1844 did little to solve the problem. Their construction forced landlords to hire men to remove “night soil” from overflowing cesspools in the city’s buildings. An entire underground army of “bone boilers,” “toshers,” and “mud-larks” developed to exploit the tide of human waste underneath the city. These scavengers—whom the author Steven Johnson calls history’s first waste recyclers—would pick through the thousands of pounds of garbage, feces, and animal corpses and then cart off these foul goods to market, where they could be reused by tanners, farmers, and other traders.
The business conducted elsewhere wasn’t any more wholesome. Fat boilers, glue renderers, fellmongers, tripe scrapers, and dog skinners all went about their malodorous tasks in some of the most densely populated areas of the city. For instance, in Smithfield—just a few minutes’ walk from St. Paul’s Cathedral—was a slaughterhouse. Its walls were caked with putrefied blood and fat. Sheep were hurled into its depths, breaking their legs before being knifed, flayed, and butchered by the men below. After a long day’s work, these same men carried on their clothes the ordure of their unholy profession back to the slums in which they lived.
This was a world crawling with hidden dangers. Even the green dye in the floral-patterned wallpapers of well-to-do homes and in the artificial leaves that adorned ladies’ hats contained deadly arsenic. Everything was contaminated with toxic substances, from the food that was consumed each day to the very water that people drank. At the time Lister went off to UCL, London was drowning in its own filth.
* * *
In the midst of all this grime and muck, the city’s citizens were trying to make improvements to their capital. Bloomsbury, the area surrounding the university where Lister would spend his time as a student, for example, had the pleasing aura of a freshly scrubbed baby. It was in a constant state of flux, growing at such a rapid pace that those who moved there in 1800 would hardly recognize it just a few decades later. When the young doctor Peter Mark Roget—who later became the author of the thesaurus that now bears his name—moved to 46 Great Russell Street at the turn of the century, he referred to the “pure” air and sprawling gardens surrounding his home. By the 1820s, the architect Robert Smirke had begun construction of the new British Museum on Roget’s street. This imposing neoclassical structure would take twenty years to complete, during which time a cacophony of hammers, saws, and chisels rang out over Bloomsbury, shattering the neighborhood’s formerly tranquil atmosphere that Roget had enjoyed so much.
The university was part of this urban growth. One balmy evening in early June 1825, the future lord chancellor of Great Britain Henry Brougham and several reforming members of Parliament sat down together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand. There they conceived the project that was to become University College London (UCL). At this new institution, there were to be no religious stipulations. It was the first university in the country that didn’t require its students to attend daily Anglican church services—a fact that suited Lister quite well. Later, rivals from King’s College would label those who attended UCL “the Godless scum of Gower Street,” referring to the thoroughfare on which the university was located.
The curriculum at UCL would be as radical as the secular foundations on which it was built, the founders decided. The university was to feature traditional subjects like those taught at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as new ones, such as geography, architecture, and modern history. The medical school, in particular, would have an advantage over the two other universities due to its proximity to the Northern London Hospital (later known as University College Hospital), built six years after UCL was founded.
There were many who balked at the idea of a university being established in London. The satirical newspaper John Bull questioned the suitability of the raucous city as a place in which to educate Britain’s young minds. With trademark sarcasm, the newspaper quipped, “The morality of London, its quietude and salubrity, appear to combine to render the Capital the most convenient place for the education of youth.” The article continued by imagining that the university would be built in the notorious slums near Westminster Abbey named Tothill Fields; “in order to meet any objections which heads of families may make to the perilous exposure of their sons to the casualties arising from crowded streets, a large body of plain respectable females, of the middle age, will be engaged to attend students to and from the College in the mornings and evenings of each day.” Amid protests and concerns, however, the edifice of UCL was built, and the school began accepting students in October 1828.
* * *
THE UNIVERSITY WAS still in its infancy when Joseph Lister first arrived there in 1844. UCL had only three faculties: arts, medicine, and law. In keeping with his father’s wishes, Lister completed an arts degree first, which was akin to a modern-day liberal arts foundation, consisting of a variety of courses in history, literature, mathematics, and science. This was an unconventional route into surgery because most students bypassed this step altogether in the 1840s and jumped right into a medical degree. Later in life, Lister would credit his broad background for his ability to connect scientific theories to medical practice.
At five feet ten inches, Lister was taller than most of his classmates. Those who knew him often commented on his striking stature and the gracefulness with which he moved. He was classically handsome at this age, with a straight nose, full lips, and brown wavy hair. He had a nervous energy about him that became more pronounced in the company of others. Hector Charles Cameron—one of Lister’s biographers and a friend in later years—recalled the first time he met the future surgeon: “When I was admitted to the drawing-room Lister was standing with his back to the fire, tea cup in hand. As I remember him he was nearly always standing.… If for a few minutes he was seated, some new turn in the conversation seemed inevitably to force him to his feet.”
Lister’s mind was in a constant whirl of activity. When he was agitated or embarrassed, the corner of his mouth twitched, and a stammer that had plagued him in his early childhood would return. Despite this inner turbulence, Lister was described by the Stewart of Halifax as having an “indescribable air of gentleness, verging on shyness.” A friend would later write of him, “He lived in the world of his thoughts, modest, unmasterful, unassuming.”
Lister was a sober character, made all the more so by his upbringing. His community’s religious teachings stipulated that people of his faith wear somber colors at all times, and address others using antiquated pronouns such as “thee” and “thou.” As a child, Lister was surrounded by a sea of black coats and broad-brimmed hats, which the men of the family never removed, even during church services. The women dressed in plain garments with folded kerchiefs around the neck and plain shawls on their shoulders. They wore white muslin caps known as coal-scuttle bonnets. When Lister headed off to university, he donned muted colors in deference to his faith, which, among the more fashionable students of his class, no doubt made him stand out as much as his height.
Shortly after arriving at UCL, Lister took up residence at 28 London Street, near the university, and lived there with a fellow Quaker named Edward Palmer, who was eight years his senior. Palmer was one of Robert Liston’s assistants, in fact, and was described by those who knew him as a “man in straightened [sic] circumstances but with a real enthusiasm for the surgeon’s profession.” The two quickly became friends. It was partly due to Palmer’s influence that Lister was able to attend Liston’s historic experiment with ether on December 21, 1846. That Lister was there at all suggests that this was not his first time attending a medical lecture; it’s unlikely that the great Liston would have admitted him that afternoon had he not already been acquainted with him. Indeed, Lister began his study of anatomy several months before he finished his bachelor’s in arts. In his account books from the last quarter of that year, Lister notes costs for the purchase of “forceps and sharpening knives,” as well as payment of eleven shillings, to a mysterious “U.L.,” for a body part that he dissected. His eagerness to begin his medical education was apparent to all who knew him in his early years.
There was a darker side to Edward Palmer’s personality that didn’t benefit Lister. In 1847, the two men moved to 2 Bedford Place in Ampthill Square and were joined by John Hodgkin—nephew of the famous Dr. Thomas Hodgkin, who was the first to describe the very rare form of lymphoma that now bears his name. The Hodgkins and the Listers had long been friends, bonding over their shared faith. The two boys had attended Grove House together, a boarding school in Tottenham that taught a rather advanced curriculum for its time, focusing not just on the classics but also on mathematics, natural science, and modern languages. Hodgkin, who was five years younger than Lister, called their rooms in Ampthill Square “dingy” and found his two housemates “far too mature and grave,” which made “life a time of depression and joylessness.” He was not as taken with Edward Palmer as his childhood friend seemed to be when Hodgkin first arrived at UCL. The young man referred to Palmer as a “curious being … peculiar … undoubtedly an odd man.” Although Palmer was extremely devout, Hodgkin didn’t think his oddity was especially connected with his religion. Most unsettling to Hodgkin was the fact that Lister became more withdrawn the longer he lived under Palmer’s supervision. Aside from attending lectures, he seemed to take increasingly less interest in extracurricular activities, instead choosing to work hard in rather gloomy surroundings. And Palmer, who would become unhinged in later life and end his days in a mental institution, was hardly a cheerful influence in the aspiring surgeon’s life. Hodgkin warned that he didn’t think Palmer was “a very suitable companion even for Lister.”
Both Lister and Palmer stood in contrast to many of their peers. In an address to incoming medical students, one of the surgical instructors at UCL warned about the “snares which notoriously lie in wait for the youthful traveler when he has left his parental hearth, and is wandering through the high-ways and by-ways—the broad streets and narrow alleys—of a great and over-peopled city.” He railed against “vicious habits” like gambling, theatergoing, and drinking, declaring that they were “more contagious than leprosy of old, and disfigure the mind, more than that Eastern plague ever did the body.” The instructor urged the incoming class to resist these vices and instead seek to uncover scientific truths through diligent study of anatomy, physiology, and chemistry.
His warnings were not misplaced.
At the time, the term “medical student” had become a “by-word for vulgar riot and dissipation,” according to the physician William Augustus Guy. This sentiment was universal. An American journalist observed that medical students in New York were “apt to be lawless, exuberant, and addicted to nocturnal activities.” They were often a rough-looking lot who congregated in cheap lodgings and inns surrounding the great teaching hospitals. They dressed fashionably—almost gaudily—except for their distinctly grimy shirts. They walked around with cigars hanging from their mouths: an indulgence, but one that was a necessity for masking the smell of decay that permeated their clothes after time spent in the dissection room. They were the brawling, boozing, boisterous types, judging by the number of warnings against bad behavior that instructors gave to their pupils.
Of course, not everyone at UCL was a raffish youngblood. Some, like Lister, were hardworking and diligent. They lived frugally, hocking watches in the local pawnbrokers’ shops that dotted the narrow streets surrounding the university to pay for medical equipment. Others visited cutlers like J. H. Savigny, whose shop established in 1800 on the Strand was the first in London to specialize in surgical instruments. Places like this purported to sell scalpels, knives, and saws that, according to one British newspaper, were “wrought to such a degree of accuracy, as will greatly lessen the pain of the patient, and totally remove all apprehension of disappointment in the operator.”
More than anything, what separated surgical students from the rest of the student body was the instruments they carried. Surgery was still a manual craft. It was a matter of technique, not technology. The instrument case of a newly qualified surgeon consisted of knives, bone saws, forceps, probes, hooks, needles, ligatures, and lancets, the latter being especially important given the persistent popularity of bloodletting in the Victorian period. Many surgeons also carried pocket cases of instruments with them, which they used for minor procedures, usually when making house calls.
The amputation knife assumed an almost mythical place in the surgeon’s kit. It was one of the few instruments that underwent significant design changes in the first half of the nineteenth century. This was due in part to the changing nature of amputations. Older surgeons preferred the circular method, which involved making a sweeping incision around the circumference of the limb, pulling away the skin and muscle, and sawing through the bone. This called for a heavy knife with a curved, broad blade. Later generations, however, preferred what they called the flap method. Liston performed the flap method on the etherized Churchill in 1846. By the 1820s, the amputation knife was already thinner and lighter, with a straight blade reflecting the growing popularity of this technique. It involved “transfixing,” which essentially required the surgeon to stab the patient, pushing the amputation knife downward into the limb before drawing it back upward and then piercing the skin from the underside of the incision.
Some surgeons customized their knives to suit their preferred techniques. Robert Liston—who was said to carry his scalpels up his coat sleeve to keep them warm—designed his very own amputation knife, which was considerably larger than the norm, with a blade fourteen inches long and one and a quarter inches wide. The dagger’s point, the last two inches of which were razor-sharp, was created to cut through the skin, thick muscles, tendons, and tissues of the thigh with a single slice. It is little wonder that for Jack the Ripper, the “Liston knife” was the weapon of choice for the gutting of victims during his killing spree in 1888.
Instruments like the amputation knife of Lister’s student days were havens for bacteria. Fashion often trumped function. Many had decorative etchings and were stored in velvet cases, which bore bloodstains from past operations. The surgeon William Fergusson recommended that the handles of surgical instruments be made of ebony, because this would be easier to grip when cutting through slippery bundles of veins and arteries. Traditional materials such as wood, ivory, and tortoiseshell also continued to be used in the nineteenth century, even after an upsurge in the production of metal instruments. As late as 1897, one catalogue stated, “We do not think that the day when metal-handled instruments will replace ebony and ivory is near at hand.”
Lister’s first instrument case had everything a novice surgeon would need at the start of his training: bone saws to hack off limbs; forceps to pick apart tissue; probes to root out bullets and foreign bodies. But there was one tool Lister had carried with him to UCL that very few in his class possessed: his microscope. Under his father’s tutelage, he had grown into a very capable microscopist and learned to trust in the scientific instrument’s powers.
Many of Lister’s instructors still believed the microscope was not only superfluous to a study of surgery but also a threat to the medical establishment itself. Even with improvements like Joseph Jackson’s achromatic lens, the instrument continued to be regarded with suspicion by those within the medical community, many of whom lacked the skill and training to operate one effectively. What revelations did the microscope offer? Surely all relevant signs and symptoms could be observed with the naked eye. And could any of these microscopic discoveries actually lead to the effective treatment of patients? Unless the instrument offered clear benefits that were applicable to the practice of medicine and surgery, most concluded that there was no reason to waste time with it.
Still, it was difficult for British doctors to deny the important advances made in pathology on the Continent due to the microscope. The French, in particular, were making discoveries at an extraordinary pace with the aid of the scientific instrument, owing partly to the rise of large hospitals in Paris during the French Revolution. By 1788, there were 20,341 patients residing in forty-eight different hospitals around the city: an unprecedented number unmatched anywhere else in the world. A large percentage of these people would succumb to their infirmities. Because they were often poor, their bodies went unclaimed and fell into the hands of anatomists like Marie François Xavier Bichat, who reportedly carved up no fewer than six hundred bodies in the winter of 1801–1802.
Bichat’s research led him to conclude that the seat of disease was inside the body and that tissues were distinct entities that could be compromised. This was a departure from prevailing beliefs that disease attacked whole organs or the entire body. Remarkably, Bichat was able to describe and name twenty-one membranes in the human body, including connective, muscle, and nerve tissue, before he died accidentally in 1802 after falling down the steps of his own hospital.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, French physicians began using the microscope more and more. The physician Pierre Rayer performed microscopic and chemical analyses of urine for the first time in history. The physiologist and pharmacologist François Magendie began using the instrument as a teaching tool in his physiology classes, and the physicians Gabriel Andral and Jules Gavarret started to analyze blood under the lens. By the time Lister was entering medical school, some Parisian physicians were even using microscopes to diagnose diseases of the skin, blood, kidneys, and urogenital system.
Back in England, the debate continued to rage over the advantages of microscopic pathological anatomy. Lister, however, was his father’s son. At UCL, he showed himself to have a better grasp of the complex instrument’s workings than most of his professors. Writing to his father about a lecture he attended on optical instruments, he remarked that the instructor “spoke of the improvements introduced by thee, and certainly gave thee the full credit for the whole revolution in microscopic excellence and observation, and said, moreover, that these improvements were the happiest instance of the application of experiment and observation to the construction of the Microscope; also, that thy experiments had been most skilfully executed.”
And yet Lister wasn’t entirely satisfied with the lecture. To his dismay, the instructor concluded damningly that students should remain skeptical about the microscope’s useful application in medicine, because the results of any experiments with it were likely to be flawed as long as improvements were still needed. A querulous Lister complained to his father that the lecture was “rather a disappointment to me, and I fancy to others too.”
But Lister would not be easily deterred. He turned his attention to the microscopic structure of muscle after obtaining a fresh portion of human iris from UCL’s professor Wharton Jones. He noted pigment granules in the lens as well as in the iris. Later, he turned his attention to the muscular tissue within hair follicles and devised a new method for making vertical sections thin enough to be observed satisfactorily under the microscope: “By compressing a portion [of the scalp] between two thin pieces of deal [wood], and cutting off with a sharp razor fine shavings of wood and scalp together, moderately thin sections may be obtained.” From these experiments, Lister eventually published two papers in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science. These were the first of many investigations he would conduct with the microscope during his surgical career.
Years later, Lister’s supervisor had little to say about his subordinate, remarking that he was “too shy and reserved to be more than an acquaintance” when the two were working alongside each other at University College Hospital in 1851. That said, his supervisor did recall something that distinguished Lister from the other students: “He had a better microscope than any man in college.” It was this very instrument that would eventually help him unlock the medical mystery that had been plaguing his profession for centuries.
Copyright © 2017 by Lindsey Fitzharris