Joseph Lister was born in 1827 to Society of Friends (Quaker) parents
in a village to the east of London. As was considered characteristic of
Quaker families, the Listers were industrious, pious, peaceful, and serious.
With no interest in sports, hunting, or frivolity, Quakers focused on
religion, business, education, and the life of the mind. Joseph’s father was
Joseph Jackson Lister, a successful wine merchant who himself made a
serious contribution to science as a microscopist.
The elder Lister, a scientific autodidact, had befriended a young London
physician, Thomas Hodgkin (also a Quaker), who would describe the
eponymous blood disorder in 1832,^12 and the two would collaborate on
microscopy for years. Lister, even with very little formal education,
solved a 150-year-old problem that had limited the early compound
microscope to “little better than a scientific toy,”^13 transforming
microscopy into a serious scientific investigative tool. Prior to Lister’s
innovation, microscopy was limited due to chromatic aberration, where
there is a dispersion of the light traveling through the microscope’s tube.
This results in blurred, wavy images that make accurate interpretation
impossible. However, Lister’s creation corrected the visual distortions,
turning the compound microscope into a tool that revolutionized medicine,
and fueled his son’s curiosity and empowered his investigations. History is
replete with families who conceptually enabled their progenies futures. In
producing the finest microscopes the world had ever seen,^14 Lister’s own
father was literally building the optical machines that facilitated his son’s
vision.
Although Joseph Lister had excelled in his preparatory Quaker schools,
he was not eligible to attend Oxford and Cambridge, where subscription to
the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican faith was out of the question for a
young Quaker. In 1844 (at age sixteen), Lister enrolled at the University
College in London, an “Oxbridge” for students who were religious or
social rank misfits, but who showed great promise. Three years later,
Lister began medical school at the University College, where he would
graduate with honors in 1852.
Lister had been graced with one of his family’s finest microscopes when
he matriculated to medical school. While there, the young prodigy
presented two papers to the Hospital Medical Society, presciently turning
his focus on “Gangrene” and the “Use of the Microscope in Medicine” at a
time when University College offered no formal instruction on either