Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister

He proposed preventing the entry of microorganisms into the human body, leading Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic methods in surgery.

Joseph Lister subsequently publishes his results in The Lancet in a series of five articles, running from March through July 1867, entitled: "On a new method of treating compound fracture, abscess, etc.: with observation on the conditions of suppuration".

Later, on August 9, 1867, he reads a paper before the British Medical Association in Dublin, on the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, which is reprinted in The British Medical Journal.

He instructs surgeons under his responsibility to wear clean gloves and wash their hands before and after operations with five percent carbolic acid solutions.

Instruments are also washed in the same solution and assistants spray the solution in the operating theater.

One of his additional suggestions is to stop using porous natural materials in manufacturing the handles of medical instruments.

Joseph Lister’s pioneering antiseptic procedures are initially rejected by leading surgeons in the United Kingdom and the United States.

The 1869 Conference of the British Medical Association largely devotes its discussions on surgery to attacking Lister’s work on the principle of antiseptic surgery.

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.

Edgar Crookshank declares “the credit given to vaccination belongs to sanitation” in his two-volume treatise entitled A History and Pathology of Vaccination, published in 1889.

A professor of pathology and bacteriology at Kings College, Crookshank had been requested by the British government to investigate a cowpox outbreak in Lechlade, Wiltshire.

His investigations had led him to reconsider the use of cowpox-derived vaccines to immunize against smallpox, a treatment developed by Edward Jenner nearly a hundred years earlier.

His conclusion is that such vaccines are ineffective in preventing smallpox because the two diseases (cowpox and smallpox) are "totally distinct".

Vaccination policies are a divisive topic at this time and in the ensuing controversy that results from his publication, Crookshank will quit his chair at King's College London in 1891.

He will continue to speak out on health matters but will never work in a laboratory again.

He subsequently, however, will focus on the encouragement of agricultural and veterinary science, serving as a governor of the Royal Veterinary College until his death.

In 1894, Crookshank will be appointed Justice of the Peace for Sussex, and in 1906 stand unsuccessfully as East Grinstead's parliamentary candidate as a Unionist and Tariff Reformer.

In later life, he will travel extensively in the Dominions, becoming a skilled big-game hunter and deputy chairman of two Scottish-Australian corporations.

Crookshank had studied at King's College London and qualified for medicine in 1881.

He served briefly as an assistant to Joseph Lister, a physician noted for his work promoting antiseptics and sterile surgery.

In 1882, Crookshank served as a doctor with the British armed forces sent to Egypt as a result of the Urabi Revolt; he was decorated for his service at the Battle of Tel el-Kebir.

On return from Egypt, Crookshank toured Europe in 1884 for further medical training.

In Berlin, he visited the laboratory of Robert Koch and learned methods of isolating bacterial strains to investigate infectious diseases.

When he returned to London, Crookshank wrote a textbook, An Introduction to Practical Bacteriology Based on the Methods of Koch, which was published in 1886.

Subsequent editions were published under differing titles in 1887, 1890 and 1896, and a French translation by H. Bergeaud was published in Paris as soon as 1886.

In 1885, Crookshank had founded one of the world's first bacteriological laboratories for human and veterinary pathology in London.

Crookshank is also interested in the use of photography to study bacteria and had published Photography of Bacteria in 1887, the first text in English devoted solely to the photography of bacteria.

In the introduction to this book he wrote that the photographs were "intended to convince scoffers of the essential truth of the new Science, that specific, often morphologically distinct, microorganisms were the cause of particular infectious diseases".

During this time he became interested in the study of infectious diseases in animals and in 1886 had been awarded the chair of Comparative Pathology and Bacteriology at King's College London.