Posted on 11/18/2017 10:02:53 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
The only place you’d expect to encounter the “unmistakable smell of rotting flesh” these days would be at a slaughterhouse.
In Victorian London, you’d find it in an operating room.
A “surgeon, wearing a blood-encrusted apron, rarely washed his hands or his instruments and carried with him … the unmistakable smell of rotting flesh . . . cheerfully referred to as ‘good old hospital stink,’ ” writes Lindsey Fitzharris, author of “The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine,” out now.
At the time, the medical community was unaware of the existence of germs and didn’t know how infectious diseases were passed. As a result, cleanliness was not a factor in surgery, leading to gruesome sights and harrowing results.
Surgeons — then regarded as low-status workers and often paid less than men employed to pick lice off hospital beds — didn’t bother cleaning the blood and guts from surgical tables or their instruments between operations. No one in the operating theater wore gloves, and “it was not uncommon to see a medical student with shreds of flesh, gut or brains stuck to his clothing.”
Hospitals were so deadly that surgeries done at home — usually on one’s kitchen table — had a much greater survival rate than those done in house of medicine.
In 1852, Joseph Lister was the young house surgeon at London’s University College Hospital. While dealing with an outbreak of gangrene, then common in hospitals, he noticed that when he cleaned his patients’ ulcers — an unusual practice at the time — they had much higher incidence of recovery.
Eliminating hospital infections became his obsession. He traveled throughout Europe to see how other hospitals handled the issue and conducted his own research. His breakthrough came when he learned about the work of Louis Pasteur.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Listerine.
What??!! A white person made an important contribution to the world that helps whites and all minorities as well?? That can’t be true! Where’s the white-shamers when you need them!
That was very interesting.
Thank you for posting.
No problem, glad you enjoyed it.
I work in an emergency department where I always have my trusty pair of Lister bandage scissors in my pocket.
Sometime, read The Century of the Surgeon, by Jurgen Thorwald. It deals with the discoveries of asepsis and anesthesia in the 19th century, which made modern surgery possible.
There was a Dr. Semmelweis, Hungarian I think, who noticed a link between babies and mothers with midwives living longer than babies and mothers from surgeons. Of course back then surgeons would do autopsies and then immediately go deliver w/o washing their hands. This doctor was laughed and eventually lost his job.
Lister deserves a lot of credit in that he was accepted. However it should be noted that what Lister proposed was something Ignaz Semmelweis had come upon several year before:
“...Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors’ wards had three times the mortality of midwives’ wards.[5] He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.
Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands. Semmelweis’s practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist’s research, practiced and operated, using hygienic methods, with great success.”
Ignasz Semmelweis came to a similar conclusion a few years earlier, but apparently he was an unpleasant SOB so his advice, though effective, was generally ignored.
***At the time,(1852) the medical community was unaware of the existence of germs and didn’t know how infectious diseases were passed.***
But I have it on good authority, (FACEBOOK) that the early explorers knew all about such nasties and purposefully infected the Indians and killed them all off with blankets and other infected goods because white men are just no dam good!
Sarc/off
***“unmistakable smell of rotting flesh” these days would be at a slaughterhouse. ***
Today’s slaughterhouses are extremely clean, but there is the smell of fresh meat, nothing rotten.
I read it fifty years ago! Great book!
Thanks for the Semmelweis references.
Thanks for the tip.
The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War
by Thomas P. Lowry
https://www.amazon.com/Story-Soldiers-Wouldnt-Tell-Civil/dp/0811711536
Great book!
:^) “One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.”
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