Lindsey Fitzharris > Quotes

“The best that can be said about Victorian hospitals is that they were a slight improvement over their Georgian predecessors. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement when one considers that a hospital’s “Chief Bug-Catcher”—whose job it was to rid the mattresses of lice—was paid more than its surgeons.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“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.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“The adoption of Lister’s antiseptic system was the most prominent outward sign of the medical community’s acceptance of a germ theory, and it marked the epochal moment when medicine and science merged.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“There are not many writers who would mention their divorce lawyer in the acknowledgments, but mine deserves special recognition. Farhana Shazady fought fiercely for my rights. Thank you for teaching me to value myself again.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“Anything that leads a man to think it a matter of indifference whether he writes or tells a lie is most pernicious,” Lister wrote; “he comes to write lies afterwards with the same indifference.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“If Lister had nursed any hope that his diligence and reasoned argument concerning his antiseptic system would convert the American audience, he would be sorely disappointed. One attendee accused him of being mentally unhinged and having a “grasshopper in the head.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“The symptoms syphilis engendered worsened over time. In addition to the unsightly skin ulcers that pockmarked the body in the later stages of the disease, many victims endured paralysis, blindness, dementia, and “saddle nose,” a grotesque deformity that occurs when the bridge of the nose caves into the face. (Syphilis was so common that “no nose clubs” sprang up all over London. One newspaper reported that “an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood.” The man, who assumed the alias of Mr. Crampton for these clandestine parties, entertained his noseless friends every month for a year until his death, at which time the group “unhappily dissolved.”)”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“From the moment he looked through the lens of his father’s microscope to the day he was knighted by Queen Victoria, his life was shaped and influenced by his circumstances and the people around him. Like all of us, he saw his world through the prism of opinions held by those whom he admired most:”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“Lister understood that being in a hospital could be a terrifying experience and followed his own golden rule: “Every patient, even the most degraded, should be treated with the same care and regard as though he were the Prince of Wales himself.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant’s fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator’s coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“Erysipelas was one of four major infections that plagued hospitals in the nineteenth century. The other three were hospital gangrene (ulcers that lead to decay of flesh, muscle, and bone), septicemia (blood poisoning), and pyemia (development of pus-filled abscesses).”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“In 1884, the American physician William Pancoast injected sperm from his “best-looking” student into an anesthetized woman—without her knowledge—whose husband had been deemed infertile. Nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby. Pancoast eventually told her husband what he had done, but the two men decided to spare the woman the truth. Pancoast’s experiment remained a secret for twenty-five years.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant's fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator's coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris

“In 1884, the American physician William Pancoast injected sperm from his “best-looking” student into an anesthetized woman—without her knowledge—whose husband had been deemed infertile. Nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby. Pancoast eventually told her husband what he had done, but the two men decided to spare the woman the truth. Pancoast’s experiment remained a secret for twenty-five years. After his death in 1909, the donor—a man ironically named Dr. Addison Davis Hard—confessed to the underhanded deed in a letter to Medical World.)”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“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”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“As Lister’s methods evolved, skeptics characterized these constant modifications as admissions on his part that the original system did not work. They didn’t see these adjustments as part of the natural progression of a scientific process”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“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”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“four major infections that plagued hospitals in the nineteenth century. The other three were hospital gangrene (ulcers that lead to decay of flesh, muscle, and bone), septicemia (blood poisoning), and pyemia (development of pus-filled abscesses). Any one of these conditions could prove fatal depending on a wide range of factors, not least the age and general health of the sufferer. The increase in infection and suppuration brought on”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“Lister fitou diretamente o rapaz antes de repreendê-lo: 'Como se atreve a me entregar um bisturi que não gostaria que fosse usado no senhor para ser utilizado neste pobre homem?”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“three pints of pus from his sacral region”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“Liston’s speed was both a gift and a curse. Once, he accidentally sliced off a patient’s testicle along with the leg he was amputating. His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant’s fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator’s coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“O papel do conhecimento e da metodologia científicos na prática médica - que foi central para que a profissão deixasse de ser uma arte sanguinolenta e se transformasse numa disciplina voltada para o futuro - ainda não tinha sido estabelecido”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“From the moment that the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: Europe’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I

“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”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“O progresso sob a forma da urbanização e da industrialização se dava à custas das vidas humanas, mas o progresso sob a forma de ciência poderia fornecer respostas para problemas crescentes nos hospitais.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“When the time came to graduate, he was placed last on the honors list for physiology and comparative anatomy. His professor William Carpenter cited the reason for this slight in a letter to him: “I think it as well to let you know the reason why I found it requisite to place you there.… As answers to my questions, your papers were so defective, that if it had 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.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“prone to infection, and surgical intervention was extremely”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“Many of these victims would have undoubtedly been”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine