Joseph Lister came of age as surgery was being transformed.With the invention of anesthesia, operations could move beyond two-minute leg amputations that occasionally lopped off a testicle in haste.

The Butchering Art traces Lister's lifelong obsession with finding an antiseptic treatment, a quest balanced somewhere between serendipity and Sisyphus: His inventor father gifted him the sort of ...

Not very long ago, you could die from a broken arm--and many did. That all changed with an idea we think of as pretty basic today: surgery needs to be sterile. On this day in 1867, Joseph Lister ...

1867: British surgeon Joseph Lister performs the first surgery under antiseptic conditions. Death rates would plummet, but you should still be thankful you were born in the 20th century and not ...

John Snow's ending of London's 1854 cholera outbreak, Joseph Lister's development of antiseptic surgery, Alexander Fleming's invention of the drug penicillin — the history of science and ...