The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

In The Butchering Art, author and historian Lindsey Fitzharris lays out the grisly, almost unbelievable horrors of Victorian medicine in shocking detail. In it she shares stories of pre-anesthesia surgery while telling the story of Joseph Lister, the quiet Quaker doctor who discovered that germs were the cause of all infections and developed the antiseptic methods that ushered in the modern era of medicine.