On This Day in History: August 12

The first antiseptic surgery

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Do research on maternal death. Gather data. Compare data. Come up with a convincing hypothesis. Tell doctors to wash their hands. Get your ass fired. So much for the scientific method. And you thought 2020 was bad with that Trump-endorsed doctor promoting her demon semen idiocy.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 12, 1865--

This is a story of two doctors. We’ll begin with Hungarian Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, who was working at a maternity clinic in Vienna in 1846. Back then, doctors still believed in air ghosts causing disease, or some equally stupid shit. Ignaz noticed that in the maternity ward where doctors delivered babies, there was five times the maternal death rate than when babies were delivered by midwives.

So, he compared several data points, ruling out all sorts of dumb shit like priests ringing bells, but when a colleague died from the same “childbed fever” the mothers were dying from, he got an idea. He realized that the doctors were doing autopsies, and the midwives weren’t. He surmised there were cadaver particles that were spreading disease.

He told doctors to wash their damn hands and instruments in a chlorine solution, and the death rate fell markedly. However, the doctors were miffed at being told THEY had been the ones causing maternal deaths. And Ignaz wasn’t the easiest guy to get along with and was all JUST WASH YOUR FUCKING HANDS! Eventually, he was fired, and the doctors went back to not washing their hands. Idiots.

Fast forward 19 years.

Joseph Lister was a British surgeon fascinated with reducing wound infections. Following the work of Louis Pasteur, he advocated the use of carbolic acid to sanitize instruments and wounds. In 1865, a seven-year-old boy suffered a compound fracture (that’s when a bone breaks so bad it pops outside the skin—ew) when a cart wheel ran over his leg. On August 12, Lister worked on the boy at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and as part of his treatment sprayed his instruments, the wound opening, and the dressings in a solution of carbolic acid, having learned earlier that it was useful in preventing gangrene.

It was the first antiseptic surgery. Afterward, he was amazed at how well the wound had healed, and he went on to publish a series of six articles in The Lancet two years later documenting his results. It proved a turning point in the history of medicine, a critical juncture in the germ theory of medicine.

And if his name sounds familiar, it’s where “Listerine” comes from.

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