Joseph Lister
British surgeon and antiseptic pioneer (1827–1912)
- Fame61.3
- Momentum1.7
- Doctors rank#36
Source-basedStable
- Fame61.3
- Momentum1.7
- Doctors rank#36
- Wikipedia15.2K
Lived 1827–1912, aged 85United Kingdom
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Summary
Updated 2026-06-08
He made surgery survivable. Before Lister drenched everything in carbolic acid — instruments, skin, hands, wards — half of all patients who made it off the table died anyway from infections no one understood. He connected the dots between Pasteur's germs and rotting wounds, and operating theaters stopped being death traps.
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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 pl…
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Fame
Stable61.3
Composite of search demand, mentions, audience & graph footprint.
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Momentum1.7
Historical24.5
Now attention12.7
Source confidence60.0
Completeness70.0
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- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
- WikipediaHigh confidencewikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
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