TY - JOUR
AU - Crowther,, Anne
AB - Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/shm/article-abstract/33/1/340/5599879 by guest on 04 March 2020 340 Book Reviews Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, London: Penguin Books, 2018. Pp. 286. £9.99. ISBN 978 0 141 98338 7. Medical history needs popular texts for the general reader, but few medical historians have managed the crossover as effectively as Roy Porter or Ruth Richardson. Lindsey Fitzharris’s praiseworthy aim is to revive interest in Joseph Lister, who may be fading from memory except via Listerine, a product that took his name without permission. His early antiseptic methods, rapidly superseded by asepsis, led some to doubt whether he really was ‘the father of modern surgery’. Yet when he died in 1912, his reputation seemed unassailable, reinforced in 1917 in the biography by his nephew Rickman Godlee. Memoirs by Lister’s admirers kept his fame alive through the 1920s, but the bio- graphical narrative has largely dried up since. Fitzharris’s main strength is her account of Lister’s life from early days until the access of fame in the 1870s. She uses his extensive family correspondence to relate engagingly many details that Godlee’s generation ignored, including Lister’s lifestyle and his personal relationships. 
TI - Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
JO - Social History of Medicine
DO - 10.1093/shm/hkz101
DA - 2020-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/lindsey-fitzharris-the-butchering-art-joseph-lister-s-quest-to-poL6lHkf8Y
SP - 340
VL - 33
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -