Joseph Lister:My World History Game Changer

1415 Words3 Pages

Around the world, Joseph Lister is considered to be the “father of modern surgery” (Pitt & Aubin, 2012). Joseph Lister was a surgeon in England that not only influenced the surgery techniques of surgeons in England, but who also played a major role in the sterilization techniques that surgeons use in our country. He realized that the infections and deaths that occurred after surgery were caused by bacteria and was able to come up with a sterilization technique that would minimize the deaths of the patients. The sterilization technique that Lister used was an antiseptic method. By using the antiseptic method that used carbolic acid, Lister was able to prevent any contamination of the wound or medical instruments that were involved in performing the surgery in order to decrease the amount of deaths that occurred from infections by bacteria. Through the creation of this antiseptic technique, Joseph Lister introduced to the world an invention that improved the safety of surgery and influenced the way surgeons in other countries, such as Germany and the United States, would view microorganisms’ effect on surgical wounds eventually leading to the modernization of surgery.
Joseph Lister was born in 1827 in Upton England. He was born into a wealthy family and his father was Joseph Jackson Lister who was a wine merchant and created the achromatic microscope. Lister went to obtain a college education at University College London and graduated as a medical student. Eventually, he went to work with James Syme at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. His main area of study was inflammation and wound healing, which he had performed numerous studies on by observing the vascular changes that occurred in a frog’s foot (Ellis, 2012). Before his inf...

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Ellis, Harold, “Joseph Lister: father of modern surgery.” British Journal of Hospital Medicine 73, no. 1 (2012): 52, accessed February 1, 2014, http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=34d88c2f-9c0a-445b-95e6-031823e06676%40sessionmgr198&hid=105
Pitt, Dennis & Aubin, Jean-Michel, “Joseph Lister: Father of Modern Surgery.” Canadian Journal of Surgery 55, no. 5 (2012): E8-E9, accessed February 1, 2014, http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=34d88c2f-9c0a-445b-95e6-031823e06676%40sessionmgr198&vid=4&hid=105
Newsom, S.W.B, “Pioneers in infection control-Joseph Lister.” Journal of Hospital Infection 55, (2003): 246-253, accessed March 7, 2014, http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/science/article/pii/S0195670103003049?

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