Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister was born 5 April 1827 in England and trained as a surgeon, though by hand he was never exceptional. What changed everything was his willingness to see what others ignored: that something invisible was killing patients after the knife came out. Working at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, he began sterilising with carbolic acid in the 1860s, applying Pasteur's germ theory to the problem of putrefaction in surgical wounds. He studied inflammation, tissue perfusion, wound healing under microscopes - building the scaffolding of antiseptic principle piece by piece. Post-operative infections plummeted. Surgery became a craft you could survive. He died 10 February 1912, by then a baron and the man who'd turned operating rooms from gambles into medicine.