Review: Fitzharris, The Butchering Art (2017)

[truepenny]

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is basically a biography of Joseph Lister and his invention of antisepsis, so the title is a little bit misleading. It's a perfectly fine biography, only slightly hagiographic (and honestly how can you not be slightly hagiographic about a Quaker surgeon who revolutionized medicine and was friends with Louis Pasteur?), and certainly hammers home the importance of germ theory in making surgery a survivable experience. Fitzharris gets some facts wrong about Burke & Hare (the only place where I have the knowledge to fact-check), and I came away from the book feeling slightly disappointed, although I'm not sure why. Maybe just that I really wanted a book about "the butchering art," not a biography of the man who made it something else.



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