Lindsey Fitzharris, PhD in medical history, reveals Victorian-era surgery’s brutal reality—from Robert Liston’s deadly speed to Joseph Lister’s germ theory breakthroughs, including Listerine’s original gonorrhea use. She debunks myths like Caesar’s birth inspiring C-sections and explores syphilis’ devastating effects, from Al Capone’s decline to Louis XIV’s 48 wig makers. Modern medicine’s nonlinear progress contrasts with historical quackery, yet fears persist, like anti-vaccine skepticism or social media-driven cosmetic surgery trends. Fitzharris’ work exposes how past medical horrors—like urine wheels and mercury treatments—mirror today’s bizarre yet real health practices. [Automatically generated summary]
This was a real fun thing to get through customs when I was coming in from Britain.
It's a Victorian amputation saw.
It's called the Clockwork Saw.
And for people who are just listening, it's a circular saw, and there would have been a crank that you wound it with, and then you'd release it, and it would spin sort of automatically.
Now, in those old days when they didn't have antibiotics and antiseptic, when they saw someone's leg off or something like that, how many times do those people live?
But then, of course, you could die of post-operative infection.
So my book, The Butchering Art, really focuses on this one guy named Joseph Lister, who applies germ theory and develops antisepsis, so germ-fighting techniques.
And most people don't know who he is, but they know the product Listerine.
So Listerine was named after him.
But I always tell people that.
So basically, Lister was a British surgeon and he came to America in 1876 to convince the medical community of germs.
And there was a guy in the audience and he decided to create this product Listerine.
But it wasn't even a mouthwash in the 19th century.
And when I sent you my book, I signed it and I said I thought that being strapped to the Victorian Operating Theater was the original fear factor because I can't imagine anything worse than being strapped to this table.
So actually, the Liston knife that he invented was this long-glaided knife, which they think Jack the Ripper may have also used, which is why those rumors are that Jack the Ripper may have been a medical practitioner.
Yeah, and recently there was some kind of bogus DNA test of a shawl that they said belonged to one of the victims.
It's impossible to prove the provenance of the object.
But that was Liston, so he's 6'2", he's really tall.
One of my favorite stories is he would go so fast, as he was switching instruments, he'd hold these bloody instruments in his mouth, just to illustrate how different this was.
Jesus.
That's the face I wanted.
I wanted to be just totally disgusted through this whole segment.
And as he was switching instruments, he accidentally cut off his assistant's finger.
And then as he was switching instrument, he slashed the coat of a spectator.
And the assistant died of gangrene, the patient died of gangrene, and the spectator died of fright.
At this point, there's so many objects that can cause offense, of course, with medical history.
There's a lot of dark history, body snatchers and things like that.
And I'm a firm believer that we should tell these stories openly because they happened and medicine and science grew as a result of it.
But they're not easy subjects to discuss with an audience, especially when you have so many characters on Twitter and you're trying to get out a complex idea.
I always say to my audience, so I've been going around the world sort of demolishing romantic notions about people might think about what it's like to live in the past because it was pretty, pretty bad.
Yeah, I did my book launch there, and if people want to see it, I filmed sort of like a theatrical scene of a young lister attending an operation in that theater, and it's on my YouTube channel called Under the Knife.
And I really want to get this made into a movie.
I'm trying to come into Hollywood and convince Hollywood that this Quaker surgeon from the Victorian period deserves the cinema feature.
But it is an epic story.
He saved more lives than any other person to ever live.
And in the past, before anesthesia, a lot of times patients were sat in chairs, so they weren't laid down.
And they were sat in these very high chairs so that their feet dangled, so they couldn't brace against the knife, if you think about pushing off with your feet.
There's a story about a guy named Robert Penman, and I know we have images, and I'm sure YouTube won't take those down.
He comes to Robert Liston, the fastest knife in the West End, in 1828, and he has this huge facial tumor growing.
I mean, it's been growing for about eight years.
It's taking up his whole face.
He can't breathe now.
And Liston looks at him and says, I can't do this operation, which is tantamount to a death sentence.
But he goes up to Scotland and he goes, there he is.
Yeah, because the hospitals were crawling with all kinds of infection.
So hospitals were places for the poor.
And to give you an idea of how gross it was, the bug catcher who had rid the beds of lice, he was paid more than the doctors and surgeons in this time.
There's maggots, all kinds of things crawling around in these hospitals.
So if you were wealthy or middle class, you had your surgeon come to your home.
And so she has a surgeon come, and the surgeon determines that, yes, the breast has to come off, and says, I'm going to return, but I'm not going to tell you the day, which would make me more anxious.
He thought it was going to help her not focus on it, but all you would be thinking about, right, is when is this guy going to show up?
The oldest archaeological record, I believe, is 2,000 years old of metastatic cancer.
So it's older than you think.
They're diagnosing it for centuries and centuries.
I'm not really an expert in history of cancer, but it is around.
And so with breast cancer, You know, probably by the time it got to the stage of mastectomy, it probably would have spread, if you think about, like, you know, it being visible to the naked eye.
Yeah, maybe a cyst, and she went through that for that.
And again, before antiseptics, before Lister comes on and comes up with germ-fighting techniques, this would have been so dangerous because you have this open cavity and wound.
And so Joseph Lister, when he comes up with his antiseptic techniques, he actually performs a mastectomy on his sister on his dining room table.
The barbershop quartet comes from the idea that the barber surgeons often had a musical lute in the office that you would play or the patient would play.
So this is kind of one of these stories that pops up, and they think that it might be that medical practitioners were trying to undermine the legitimacy of the barbers.
So you kind of either get this story that the barber is this sort of demon figure who's chopping you up and selling you and making you into pies, or...
Yeah, and we get the red, blue, and white barber poles now.
So what happened was the barber surgeons and the surgeons split off professionally at some point in history.
And so the surgeons start to use blue and white poles, and the barbers use red and white poles.
And I think now the red, white, and blue is like the patriotic red, white, and blue.
But the traditional barber pole would have been red and white and it would have signified that you could come in and get your blood lighting because those bloody rags would have been out there on the pole.
Before they had the pole, they would advertise by putting just bowls of congealed blood in the window.
And then in London, they decided, I think it was about the 14th century, they said, no more of that.
So the barbers started to throw the blood into the river, which was also equally gross.
So the barber surgeons would have definitely been doing minor surgical procedures, and they would have been more affordable than the surgeons and the physicians themselves.
But nobody could really do much for you in that period, according to our own sort of 21st century understanding.
But I always say, to go back to your question about, you know, how would it feel to hear something so dumb?
Well, what do you think today that, you know, in 100 years we're going to look back at?
And there's definitely going to be stuff, right, that we're going to look back and go, I can't believe that.
You know, we used to do that.
In fact, I think that this is probably going to get people to go, no, that totally works.
So they would have these heated cups and they would create this blister and then they would cut it open with this really sharp instrument and that's how they would bleed you.
So it's kind of this weird thing that's coming back but for slightly different reasons.
And I like to point people to the past because if we're going to make fun of, you know, what they were doing in the past, it's kind of making a reappearance, so to speak.
So if you had epilepsy in the early modern period, so we're like talking like 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, people would drink the blood of an executed criminal.
Someone who lost their head.
Like the idea was that the life cut short.
That the blood was a very powerful force.
And so you get these sort of drawings of people gathered at the scaffold.
You know, this poor bastard is going to lose his head.
And these people are like holding cups up to catch the blood.
And it didn't work.
And epilepsy was so awful because it was so misunderstood.
And you can imagine, you know, when someone goes into a seizure, it's scary.
And if you don't understand what's happening, you could think that it's witchcraft or there's all kinds of things that People thought about that disease, so these people were quite desperate, so they were drinking the blood of executed criminals.
They ground up mummies, ancient mummies, and they would make it into pills and did all kinds of things, right?
So I always point this out, we eat the placenta today, it's kind of like a form of ingesting bodily...
So you don't have to worry about your body rejecting it in the same way, although sometimes people's bodies don't accept it or it doesn't work.
But they take this graft, they put this new tendon in place, this new ligament in place rather, and then your body re-proliferates that ligament with cells.
So it's, even though it'll feel like it's healed up within like a month or two, like your knee will feel a little bit weak from the surgery, but people get a distorted perception of how strong it actually is.
And fighters...
In particular, I know several fighters who have wound up re-injuring their knee because they thought it was okay.
I mean, when you think about 150 years ago that I'm talking about, and today, it's just...
And I always, because I'm a big Joseph Lister fan, I always say that if we hadn't understood germs, there would be no way to go deep into the body, would there?
Yeah, there was another, there was a little boy, he was 12 years old, his name was Henry Pace, and he was told by the surgeon he had to have his leg removed.
And he said, as little kids do, would it hurt?
And the surgeon said, no more than having a tooth pulled.
So he was very unprepared.
So they brought him to the operating theater, and he was so awake and so aware, he remembers counting six strokes of the saw before his little leg fell off.
It was just a sprain and they just decided to take it off.
No, I mean, if there was a compound fracture, the chances of it becoming infected was quite high.
So when Lister comes along and he's trying to figure out what's causing infection, he notices that if it's a clean break and there's no break in the skin, usually it heals okay.
But if there's a break in the skin, it gets infected and usually it leads to some kind of gangrene or septicemia.
And that's how he starts to wonder.
It must be something coming from outside and getting into this wound that is causing the infection.
But he reads Louis Pasteur's germ theory, and this is how he starts to put it together.
But when he first comes out with it, there's a lot of pushback.
Because medicine and science are essentially conservative in the sense that it's like puzzle solving.
You solve the puzzle within the rules that are already set out.
If someone comes from sort of the fringe and has this wild idea, usually there's a lot of pushback.
And so that's exactly what happens with Lister.
And it's hard for us to imagine because germs, we understand them today.
It seems obvious to us.
But back then, a surgeon didn't wash his hands or his instruments because Why would he wash his hands or his instruments if they were going to get dirty with the next patient?
So you have to get into the mind, the logical mind of a Victorian surgeon.
They wore aprons.
I think, Jamie, I'd also sent a picture of a surgeon with his apron on.
Actually, it's a picture of a butcher.
But it gives you that kind of idea of what your friendly Victorian surgeon would have been wearing.
And that apron, the more blood it had on it, it was like a sign of pride almost because that meant that your surgeon was very experienced and had a lot of blood on it.
So my book begins with the first operation under anesthesia.
And I wanted to start there because I think if anybody has ever thought about the history of surgery, which they might not have until they turned into this podcast, they tend to think of that moment.
That's the big moment.
But actually, surgery becomes much more dangerous because the surgeon still doesn't understand germs, but he doesn't have the patient fighting him anymore.
So he's more willing to pick up the knife and go deeper in the body, and so postoperative infection rises.
And it opens with the great Robert Liston, and he performs the first operation under ether.
In 1846 in London.
And he doesn't think it's going to work.
It comes from America.
He calls it the Yankee Dodge.
And it's a miracle.
It works.
And the age of agony is over.
When ether was discovered, everybody wanted to try it.
This drug that made you insensible, what was that like?
And so you get these kinds of stories of medical students sniffing it and drinking it.
In fact, I believe there's still a place in London you can get an ether cocktail.
What?
Again, I don't endorse it.
It's highly flammable.
So people also smoked a lot in operating theaters, so you can imagine that there were a lot of accidents.
But you drop it on a, basically, because it evaporates really quickly, you drop it on a strawberry and then you dunk it into champagne.
And it's supposed to get you really high very quickly, and then it wears off equally quickly.
I tried to convince my publisher to have ether cocktails at the book launch, but they were like, hmm.
I believe there was a mummy that was found in ancient Egypt that tested positive for cocaine.
Oh.
But they think that it might be a false positive because apparently there's something else that they would consume back then that would make you test positive for cocaine.
I think what they were trying to connect this to, now I remember, they were trying to connect this to the idea that people from Egypt had the ability to travel to the Americas.
Oh, interesting.
Here it goes.
American drugs and ancient Egyptian mummies.
Can you make that a little larger, please?
It says, 1992,
performed by Svelta Balabanova.
Well done.
That's a serious woman.
And two of her colleagues at the Institute for Anthropology and, well, this is in Munich.
They're using German words for anthropology, probably in humanities, university in Munich.
The tests were carried out by nine mummies, on nine mummies, Munich Museum, dating from 1070 to 395 BC. The study focused on hair samples, which were often used to assess drug concentrations in the body.
The results, what does it say here?
Well, they discovered all the mummies tested positive for cocaine and hashish, which makes sense.
The results caused an immediate stir.
What the, come on, let's cut to the chase here, folks.
First thing to say, archaeologists are not just being stubborn about this.
There are many reasons not to think the traces of drugs and nine mummies means...
It just seems like it's going to take a long time.
Many resins and spices, hold on a second, were certainly used this day.
We aren't entirely sure what they all were.
Rare or exotic materials were almost certainly used, and it is far less of a stretch to suggest this included imports from the Middle East and potentially as far afield as India.
It says, since passing these corpses off, recently deceased as ancient mummies was a thriving tourist scam in Egypt in the Victorian era.
Like it could have...
That doesn't make sense because the tests were done in 1992. After the experiments, even assuming the cocaine was actually found on the mummies, it's possible this could have been a contamination that occurred after the discovery.
Some of it would have been sort of folk medicine influence.
You know, there's this idea of sympathetic magic.
So, for instance, if I stabbed you with a sword, it gets very violent, you could be healed.
If I put this sort of special sympathetic powder on the sword, it would heal you.
So it was sort of this healing by distance.
So all kinds of strange ideas existed.
And that's why it's important when you're studying the history of medicine to really get into the mindset because it's so wildly different to the way we think.
And actually, do you know what this is that I brought?
If people are just listening, it's a long-beaked mask.
No, we don't actually have, I don't believe there's an example of a real one from the 17th century, but there's a lot of illustrations of the plague doctor, and he would have been wearing a hat, he would have been wearing a cape, leather gloves, like sort of just protecting himself.
Authentic 16th century plague Dr. Mask preserved and on display at the, there you go, another one, Dösten Medik- Yeah, that- German Museum of Medical History.
But we don't know how much they were worn because they would have been expensive.
A lot of doctors weren't very noble, so if the plague broke out, they got the hell out of there.
There was sort of a phrase, go far and go long.
You know, get out and don't come back for a while.
There wasn't much they could do for you.
They had a stick as well that they...
We'd sort of poke the patient with, so they wouldn't have to touch the patient and kind of have them turn over and they can, you know, yes, you have the plague.
You know, if you go to Venice, they say plague Dr. Mask.
It's funny because I was just in Venice recently and they were saying that, you know, the big carnival that they have every year, it's becoming harder to do because of security reasons.
So you have like a huge population of a city wearing masks and covering their identities.
And so you think about the hazmat going into hot zones.
That would be pretty scary if you didn't know what was going on.
And certainly sort of ominous, you know, when you see the hazmat.
So it's a weird thing that exists because in a strange kind of way, it probably did protect the plague doctor because he was covering himself up, but it protected him for the wrong reasons.
He still didn't understand how disease was spread.
Yeah, there's a theory that is actually being tossed about that these people that have this ancient, well, they have this memory of childbirth, right?
So all of a sudden you're being born, there's bright lights above you, there's a man or a woman who's the surgeon with a mask that covers their face, so all you see is their eyes, and everything looks bright, and it's terrifying and clinical, and you're on this table and everything's cold.
Most of these alien abduction experiences that people recount, they take place in some sort of a medical facility.
Yeah.
And everything is bright and strange and cold.
and they think that what this is is they're saying that we had this idea that children don't have memories, that babies don't have memories.
And so they're saying, well, why wouldn't they have memories?
That's ridiculous.
Of course they have memories.
They have brains.
They grab your finger.
They look you in the eye.
They would have a memory of every second that they were born.
And it's probably one of the most profound and disturbing memories because before that, everything is incredibly peaceful.
You're inside the mother's womb.
and then you're just like taken out and And then you're pulled out, and then there's this bright light above you.
You never experience any light.
And your visual perception, your field of view is all distorted, right?
It makes sense to me, because if you think about, like...
Well, it does because people don't really go anywhere.
See, the thing about the abduction thing is they put cameras in people's rooms and they say they have these alien abduction experiences, but they don't go anywhere.
So what they're doing is they're dreaming, which is normal.
And then there's also, going back to childbirth, there's also a lot of people that have these experiences that they are being told that either they're...
Taking their baby away from them, or they're studying their baby, or that they had a baby inside of them that they didn't know about, and that the aliens have put it there, and they're taking it out.
And actually, the term gossip comes from the idea that the women who would spread the word in the village that someone was going into labor, they were called the gossips.
So they spread the word.
It became sort of a negative thing later.
So the gossips would spread the word, the women would come in.
This was a female-only chamber, and men were not really allowed in.
A man might be brought in if the mother was dying or if the child was dying.
And then in that case, instruments were brought into the birthing chamber.
So the doctor might come in and he might take these sort of forceps and pick the baby apart and take the baby out.
The baby would die.
But in those cases, it was like really extreme.
Like this was going to happen.
Like either the mother was going to die, the baby was going to die.
Yeah, I mean, a capable midwife could handle that.
But this, you know, the Caesarian section, people think that it comes from the term, the idea that Julius Caesar was ripped from the womb of his mother.
But it's unlikely that that story is true because his mother lives into old age.
So probably the term cesarean comes from the Latin term meaning to cut.
And the first sort of record we have of this happening, I think, is in the 16th century.
And it's a farmer.
And he takes the instruments that he uses to castrate his pigs to cut this baby out of his wife.
And it's amazing because what they do is, obviously, they take the skull out and it's a process.
And this documentary was looking at, they were DNA testing them because the tribe that makes these skulls, they were done for a specific purpose to trap the soul of the warrior that they killed so that there was a spiritual reason behind it.
But what they were finding was that some of these shrunken heads were female.
Which probably means that as Westerners came into these areas, they wanted to collect these shrunken heads as curiosities, of course.
And so they traded guns for heads.
And so it kind of drove up the demand for these shrunken heads.
I was 5'7 by the age of 10, and I was just like that weird kid with tales from the crypt.
So I went on to study history in college, and then I went to Oxford and I did a master's and PhD in it.
But academia doesn't allow me to be as creative and weird as I'd like to be.
So now I'm just a storyteller, I'm a freelance writer, and I do this YouTube channel, and I'm sure Oxford's going to be like, give us the PhD back at some point.
And, you know, with your knee surgery, it was an injury from activity, right?
And you think about people in the past, they weren't necessarily, well, I mean, there were sports and competitions, but mostly people were getting injuries from repetitive, strenuous labor that they were doing.
There's a story of a cab driver in the 18th century, and he got this aneurysm behind his knee.
So the cab drivers in the 18th century wore these high boots, like riding boots, and it would rub at the back of the knee and it created this huge aneurysm.
And there was a surgeon named John Hunter in London who said, "Well, normally what you do is you would hack the leg off because if it pops, you're going to bleed out." But he said, "I have an idea.
I want to cut into the leg and I want to tie off the blood supply to the aneurysm.
I want to see if that works." And it did.
And he saved this guy's leg.
And that's really important because, remember, these people had no options if they couldn't work.
Yeah, and if he had lost his leg, it would have been...
And what's incredible about that story, actually, is that Hunter saves the leg, and then when the man dies, right before he dies, he knows he's going to die.
This is many years later.
He writes a letter, and he wills his body to Hunter.
So this is one of the first early examples to take the leg and to open it up and dissect it and to see what happened.
And so that leg is on display at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
Well, there has been controversies with certain exhibitions, maybe not Body Worlds, but there's been some spinoffs where there's been a question of where they got those bodies.
And of course, if you're also going into sort of poor areas and asking people to hand over their bodies, is it really consent?
Because sometimes these families don't have money for funerals.
So there's other incentives.
But I think my view is...
You know, it's given under the guise of science that we can only view dead bodies through the lens of science today.
That's the only acceptable way, but it really is art.
And I wish that it would just be more openly recognized as just art, whether it's your kind of thing or not, because some of it is posed in really shocking ways that are unnecessary to teach anatomy.
So, you know, if you're going to say it's an anatomical lesson, Why does the person have to be posed in this sort of dramatic way?
So I think that, you know, it would be better if we just called it for what it was.
It's art and it's supposed to be provocative and shocking.
It's really interesting that it's called a theater as well.
Did you ever see that movie with Benicio Del Toro?
I think it was just The Wolfman.
It was one of the more recent werewolf movies, but he becomes a werewolf in the operating theater.
So the doctor is convinced that he's a madman, there's something wrong with him, so they give him electric shock therapy and all these different things.
You know, the doctors were experimenting with electricity a lot and galvanism and things like kind of reanimating the corpses, which is when we get the story of Frankenstein.
And they were also interested in how long do you live or your conscience after you're beheaded.
So there's these experiments during the French Revolution where they're like shouting at the heads to see if the heads will blink.
But this is the modern version of it that they decided to make, and the thing is that these guys are watching this, and the doctor is arrogant, and he has his back to the patient while he's discussing everything that's wrong with the patient.
Yeah, well, it's also, they decided in this movie to make it with minimal use of CGI. What they decided to do is do it all with actual rubber masks and things like that.
It actually, it's funny because it sort of reminds me of, again, Liston, the 6'2 giant.
He got a patient on the table who had to have a bladder stone removed.
Remember how awful that was?
And this guy was like, fuck it, I'm not going to do it.
He jumps off the table, he runs across the room, locks himself in a closet, and Liston, Liston, all 6'2 of them, chases this guy, rips the door off, and just drags him back.
Listen, I could sell the rights to the book, but I've held on to them and I'm developing them with my producing partner because this book was born out of a lot of trauma.
So a couple years ago, I went through a really bad divorce and I was facing deportation as a result from the UK. Oh, wow.
I'm fascinated with movies.
I want to kind of see how the sausage is made, so to speak.
You know, if you're a writer and you just saw off the rights, you don't really have much creative input at all.
But yeah, I just think that, you know, it's a great story because it sort of crosses with people who are interested in the horror genre, right?
Because you get the surgery, the Victorian surgery, but it's an uplifting story about something that changed the world in the way we fundamentally understand it.
So I'm looking at a guy named Harold Gillies, who was rebuilding soldiers' faces during World War I. And if you've ever seen these guys' photos, I mean, we have no problems.
You think, we have no problems in the 21st century, and you look at these guys because they've been shot through the face and their jaws are missing.
And Harold Gillies really designs or starts plastic surgery as we know it.
And it was a time when losing a limb made you a hero, but losing your face made you a monster.
So these guys are really isolated.
And so what Gillies does is he gives them their identity back.
So it starts on the battlefields of World War I, and it's going to kind of follow Gillies throughout.
I like to do character-driven stories.
Even though they're 100% true, I like to sort of follow medical history through the eyes of one particular person.
I started following some plastic surgeons on Instagram just to kind of know what they're doing today and thinking about the ethics of how they target people on social media and how do we feel about that.
And I'm telling you, I'm 37. I'm feeling bad about my body.
I can't imagine if you're like 14 and awkward and you're Barb, you know, and you have access to these accounts and the effect it has on young people on Instagram and everything.
Well, I had Jonathan Haidt on the podcast who wrote this book, The Coddling of the American Mind, and one of the big things that he discusses is people comparing themselves to others through social media and children, particularly girls.
There's higher instances of suicide, cutting, depression, much higher instances of depression.
And what he did was he invented this thing called the tubed pedicle where he would take skin and he would – he basically created a tube and he could place it somewhere on the face where the defect was and the blood supply would make it attach and – That guy did an incredible job on that guy's nose.
Yeah, I think the hardest part is finding the donor.
It's hard to get people to donate their organs as it is, but think about a face.
It's so personal.
And the last one, National Geographic, did a spread on it.
I think it was an 18-year-old girl who shot herself in the face.
And in a moment of rage, and anyway, she ended up having this face transplant about three years later.
And the donor face, I think, was someone who was in their 30s.
This person had died, I think, of an overdose.
And then the family decided to give this face over.
So it's actually incredible what we can do when you think about, you know, from the battlefields of World War I to what Gilly's doing to where we are today with facial reconstruction.
This woman who's friends with my wife, her neighbor is a model, and she takes all of her photos with no makeup on, and then they put the makeup on her.
Yeah, and I think it's interesting because celebrities like yourself have to really think about how your image is used after you're gone as well now.
Like something that you didn't have to think about.
So there was a commercial with Audrey Hepburn in Britain, and it's a galaxy chocolate commercial.
And she's there and it looks like she's eating a chocolate bar.
And so the ways that they can manipulate images.
And I think for the first time, a lot of celebrities need to really think carefully about whether they're okay with their images being used in certain kinds of ways after their death, like who owns your image.
It's just like when you look at medical history in the past, you don't own your body.
And so a lot of these surgeons get hold of these bodies to dissect.
And they're digging them up from graveyards.
There were body snatchers.
They called themselves resurrection men.
And they would go into these cemeteries and they would dig up these bodies.
And they would oftentimes strip the body naked because it was illegal to steal possessions from the corpse but not the body itself.
Because there was no concept of the body being sort of property.
So they would throw the clothes back into the grave.
And they were really clever in the ways they did it.
They usually sent a woman in the daytime to masquerade as a mourner.
And she would kind of go through the graveyard and she would see where the fresh graves were because of course you'd want the body to be as fresh as possible.
And then at nighttime they would go in there and they would dig up these bodies and they could take as many as 12 bodies in a night.
It was like hard labor and it was very lucrative because the only legal bodies to dissect in Britain in the early 19th century were bodies of executed criminals.
Of people who had murdered other people, so specifically murderers.
Well, they would cover it up, but you do get these stories of people finding out that a body...
1785, this person goes to this graveyard and discovers that a body is missing, that a body has been snatched.
And everybody in the village goes to this graveyard and digs up their relatives and drags these coffins back to their home until they can make the cemetery safer.
because think about how much we learn from these bodies.
Bodies were needed to be dissected to teach medical students.
And one of the scenes in the book, I talk about the dead house.
They called it the dead house.
And everybody had a different experience in the dead house.
There's probably people listening who've been in a dissection room, and you have a really vivid memory of that.
It's probably bright and white and clinical.
Well, these places, the bodies would have been bloated and partly decomposed, Dissecting bodies was dangerous because you could cut yourself and you can infect yourself with bacteria.
They weren't wearing gloves.
And so you get examples of people cutting themselves and dying within 48 hours.
So going into medicine was dangerous.
And there's a story in this book about a guy who goes into the dead house for the first time and he freaks out and he sees all these like mice and rats and things like that eating the bodies.
And so he jumps out the window and he runs off.
But later he becomes accustomed to it as we all become accustomed to horrible things at some point.
And he actually starts taking pieces of the corpse and throwing it to the poor little starving creatures that are in the dead house.
Jesus!
Yeah, so it's kind of like, you know, that horror that we all experience possibly when we're confronted with death to accepting it as you have to as a medical student if you want to go on.
So the dead house is particularly – it would have smelled – dissection would have been a winter sport because the bodies wouldn't decompose as quickly.
You, of course, wouldn't want to be dissecting in the heat of the summer.
I mean, I had Dr. Peter Hotez on recently to talk about vaccines and the misconceptions that people have.
And he explained that they've isolated a bunch of different environmental factors and genes that contribute to autism, but that it all takes place in the womb.
And I always tell people, you know, it is that idea of what you can't see.
It's hard to convince people.
And with Lister, you know, if you think about it, here's this young guy and he's coming along and he's saying there's these invisible little creatures and they're killing your patients.
And trust me, I have this really weird instrument called a microscope and I can see them.
And it was a leap of faith.
He was also accusing the older surgeons of inadvertently killing their patients because if they weren't washing their hands, they were leading to higher mortality rates.
So what Lister ultimately does is he turns to the younger generation and he changes their minds.
And so it's a slow burn.
It's not like, you know, the movie moment, unfortunately, where it just happens all at once.
And it takes quite a long time.
And it's weird that it takes so long, because if you think about him coming in 1876 to America, it's after the Civil War, people were dying, soldiers were dying of high infection rates.
And so people were dying of all these kinds of infections.
He comes to Philadelphia to convince the medical community and speaker after speaker just denounces him on the first day.
And then he gets up and he does his demonstrations and he starts to slowly change people's minds.
But it takes a long time.
The cover of the American book is...
The American version, I should say, is a famous painting by, I don't know if people can see that, by Samuel Gross.
It's called The Gross Clinic.
The guy in the middle, it is gross as well, but the guy in the middle is Samuel Gross.
And he so didn't believe in Lister that he would walk into the room and he'd slam the door and he'd say, there.
Mr. Lister's germs can't get in anymore.
And you can see in this that he's wearing his street clothes.
He's sticking his dirty fingers into this wound.
And there's a woman in the background, and she's covering her face, and she's the mother of the patient.
And she's wearing black because she expects her son to die.
So this is the US cover and for the UK cover, I think I sent that to you Jamie, I sent you a picture of both covers side by side.
It's another painting by Eakins and it was done within 10 years and it's called the Agnew Clinic and it's totally different because the doctors are wearing white, there's a sense that they understand germs, there's a sense that antisepsis is being used there.
So that kind of before and after shot in such a short period that Lister is able to change the world.
So Penguin published it in the UK, so they've stylized the original painting, but you kind of get a sense of what it would have looked like.
And actually, you have women appearing in the operating theater professionally as nurses, so this is after the Florence Nightingale revolution as well.
So it still looks different to the way we operate, but you can definitely see a difference between those two paintings.
So Florence Nightingale is in this book a little bit.
People always wonder why I didn't speak about her as much, but actually she didn't believe in germs at first.
She thought Lister was quite hysterical with his idea of germs, but she was working towards sanitation in hospitals.
So they're working towards the same goal, but just with different...
Slightly different tactics.
So she revolutionizes nursing to make it a more respectable profession.
Before then, nurses, you wouldn't want your daughter becoming a nurse if you were from a well-respected family because she would be privy to the male body.
So you wouldn't want her interacting with male patients.
So really kind of lowly, poor women went into nursing and And it wasn't really a respected profession until Florence Nightingale comes along and there's this sort of revolution.
So the revolution is not just about the profession, though, but it's about the sanitation reforms that she brings about in hospitals.
So you see that on the cover as well.
But there's also another guy.
I'm sure there's like...
I always sort of predict comments.
I shouldn't think about what people are going to say, but...
People tend to get mad when I give lectures because I don't talk about this guy.
There's groupies out there that love this physician named Semmelweis.
Because every time I give a talk, there's always one person who asks this question.
And I have to smile to myself and I'm like, here it is.
And they say, well, I think you'll find you haven't talked about Semmelweis.
Kamelweiss was practicing in Austria, and he was putting this idea together that if you wash your hands and you go onto the hospital wards, infection rates went down.
And he was ridiculed heavily.
They called him the hand washer.
And he ends up being put in an insane asylum.
And it's this really kind of sad, weird death that he has.
And he's really sort of persecuted for these ideas of hand washing and infection rates.
He's doing it a little bit before Lister comes onto the scene.
Lister's not aware of Semmelweiss' work.
But equally, I always tell people that Semmelweiss doesn't really do it first if we're going to play that game.
Because, again, there's a difference between the basic sanitation and then understanding why you're implementing it.
So until you understand that germs exist, it doesn't make sense.
You can't really convince people.
And that's where Lister comes in.
He takes Louis Pasteur's germ theory and he's able to convince people in the medical community that germs exist.
So until we understand, again, why wash your hands if they're just going to get dirty?
I thought, you know, when I was going on the show, I'm like, what can I bring Joe Rogan that's going to, you know, stimulate the conversation and anti-masturbation device?
Yeah, actually, the barbers, when they pulled teeth, sometimes they would have a drum in the shop and it would get louder as they got closer to pulling the teeth, which would make me more anxious.
So this guy had a cut of his, for people just listening, there's a slice off of his arm that's connected to his nose, and they have taped and strapped his arm to the top of his head.
So he's to stay in this position while the chunk of his arm grows into his face, and then they're going to cut it and remove it when it develops its own blood supply.
Yeah, people say, is this the best time medically?
And it's like, well, hopefully that's always true, right?
Hopefully tomorrow is better than, you know, hopefully we're advancing and learning more and everything.
I mean, I think that, you know, we shouldn't look at science and medicine as totally linear, like that we're progressing towards something, but that, you know, obviously we're learning from what doesn't work and That's why I said failure is a huge part of what I love to talk about on YouTube and stuff because we just don't talk about it enough in life and science and medicine and all the things that fail and help us get to where we are today.