SKETCH OF SIR JOSEPH LISTER. 693 



SKETCH OF SIR JOSEPH LISTEE. 



THE merits of Lord Lister's work in the institution of antiseptic 

 and aseptic surgery are recognized as of the very highest value 

 to the human race, and all nations are delighted to do him honor for 

 it. The general feeling is summarized in an English chronicle which 

 says that for it " he is justly regarded as one of the world's greatest 

 benefactors." Prof. H. Tillmanns, in an estimate of him published 

 in Nature's " Scientific Worthies," speaks of it as his " immortal life- 

 work," and as constituting " the greatest advance which surgery has 

 ever made." 



Sir Joseph Lister received by descent the tastes and aptitudes 

 which have enabled him to reach his present eminence. His father, 

 Joseph Jackson Lister, though a man in business, found time to 

 devote to science, was a Fellow of the Royal Society, devised an 

 improvement in the microscope, concerning which he published a 

 paper on achromatic glasses in the Philosophical Transactions; con- 

 tributed other papers to that publication; and, with Dr. Hodgkin, 

 first described the tendency of the red corpuscles of the blood to 

 arrange themselves in rouleaux. 



Joseph Lister was born at Upton in Essex, England, in 1827; 

 was taught at a private school of the Society of Friends in Totten- 

 ham; was graduated Bachelor of Arts at the University of London 

 in 1847; and studied medicine at University College, London, 

 where his attention was specially directed to physiology. Having 

 been graduated in medicine from the University of London in 1852, 

 and enjoyed a creditable career at the hospital, he went to Edin- 

 burgh, where he became associated with the late Professor Syme, 

 whose daughter he married, and was his house surgeon for a time. 

 He was appointed assistant surgeon to the Royal Infirmary, and 

 extra-academical lecturer on surgery, in which capacities he added 

 to his reputation. In 1860 he was appointed regius professor of 

 surgery in the University of Glasgow. During all this period lie 

 published many papers, the general trend of which seemed to direct 

 itself toward the field on which he has won his supreme fame. His 

 first papers, published in 1853, while he was still a student, were 

 on the muscular tissue of the skin and the contractible tissue of 

 the iris. Of papers published in Edinburgh between 1857 and 

 1860, those dealing with the subjects of inflammation and the 

 coagulation of the blood are mentioned as having been the most 

 important. The expressions of his views on this last subject were 

 one of the features of his Croonian Lecture of 1862, which, Nature 

 says, " excited great interest, upsetting as it did most of the accepted 



