Joseph Lister Research Paper

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In the 1840s, the discovery of anesthesia increased the number of operations, but also increased the chance of infection after surgery. The number of operations performed drastically dropped due to post operative inflammation and suppuration that were believed to come from the air. Nonetheless, British surgeon Sir Joseph Lister was greatly influenced and inspired by the inflammation to come up with his own surgical methods. Joseph Lister was born in West Ham, London, United Kingdom on the fifth of April in 1827. He was the fourth of seven children to Isabella Harris and Joseph Jackson Lister, a family of Quakers. Lister’s father was a wealthy wine merchant, optician, and physicist. He was famous for his development of achromatic, colorless, microscope lens. As a child, Lister conducted microscopic research of fish and small animals, which is …show more content…

Within a year, he met James Syme, the most prominent surgical teacher in his time. In 1856, Lister was promoted to assistant surgeon at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary to James Syme. He later married Agnes Syme: daughter of James Syme. They did not have children. In 1860, the couple moved to Glasgow, Scotland, where Lister became the Professor of Surgery at the Royal Infirmary. Lister began his research on microscopic changes in body tissue that cause inflammation.
Around 1864, Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, published his theory that putrefaction, or rotting of the body, was caused by germs. Pasteur concluded that fermentation and food spoilage were caused by micro-organisms called germs. He proposed three solutions to kill the germs: filtration, exposure to heat, or exposure to chemical solutions. Lister’s discoveries were greatly influenced by his time period because he utilized Pasteur’s theory to conclude that inflammation resulted from germs that entered the

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