Most people had believed that chemical damage…

Most people had believed that chemical damage from exposures to bad air—"miasma"—was responsible for infections in wounds until Joseph Lister's studies of surgery.

Hospital wards are occasionally aired out at midday as a precaution against the spread of infection via miasma, but facilities for washing hands or a patient's wounds are not available.

A surgeon is not required to wash his hands before seeing a patient because such practices are not considered necessary to avoid infection.

In 1871, a guest writes that Lister regularly “wore an old blue frock-coat for operation, which he had previously worn in the dissecting room," and which was "stiff and glazed with blood."

Dirty coats were seen as a sign of a surgeon’s knowledge and experience, and the smell was referred to as “good old surgical stink.”

Despite the work of Ignaz Semmelweis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, hospitals practice surgery under unsanitary conditions.

While a professor of surgery at the University of Glasgow, Lister had become aware of a paper published by the French chemist Louis Pasteur, showing that rotting and fermentation could occur under anaerobic conditions if micro-organisms were present.

Pasteur suggested three methods to eliminate the microorganisms responsible for gangrene: filtration, exposure to heat, or exposure to chemical solutions.

Lister had confirmed Pasteur's conclusions with his own experiments and decided to use his findings to develop antiseptic techniques for wounds.

As the first two methods suggested by Pasteur were inappropriate for the treatment of human tissue, Lister had experimented with the third.

Lister then discovered the carbolic acid.

Friedlieb Runge (1797–1867) had discovered creosote, which later was processed into carbolic acid.

Although Runge had no understanding of how decomposition occurred, the chemical had been used to treat the wood used for railway ties and ships since it protected the wood from rotting.

Later, it was used for treating sewage in England, Belgium and Holland.

The same chemical is also used to fight parasites and reduce the odors during cholera and cattle plague.

Therefore, Lister had tested the results of spraying instruments, the surgical incisions, and dressings with a solution of it.

Lister had found that carbolic acid solution swabbed on wounds remarkably reduced the incidence of gangrene.

In August 1865, Lister had applied a piece of lint dipped in carbolic acid solution onto the wound of an eleven year old boy at Glasgow Infirmary, who had sustained a compound fracture after a cart wheel had passed over his leg.

After four days, he had renewed the pad and discovered that no infection had developed, and after a total of six weeks he was amazed to discover that the boy's bones had fused back together, without the danger of suppuration.

Lister, who comes from a prosperous Quaker home in Upton, Essex, is a son of Joseph Jackson Lister, a pioneer of achromatic object lenses for the compound microscope.

At Quaker schools, he had become a fluent reader of French and German, which are also the leading languages of medical research.

As a teenager, Lister had attended Grove House School Tottenham, studying mathematics, natural science, and languages.

He had attended the University of London, one of only a few institutions which were open to Quakers at that time.

He had initially studied the Arts but had graduated with honors as Bachelor of Medicine and had entered the Royal College of Surgeons at the age of twenty-six.

In 1854, Lister had become both first assistant to and friend of surgeon James Syme at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in Scotland.