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

Winner, PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing

"Warning: She spares no detail!" —Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake

In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters—no place for the squeamish—and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed...