topic.^15 Steve Jobs presenting a speech on the future of personal
computers and portable music machines in college could not be more
perspicacious.
Lister’s first twenty-six years were spent within a ten-mile radius in
London, but his unquenched thirst for knowledge propelled him outside
the circle of London to Edinburgh, Scotland, to complete his surgical
training under James Syme, acknowledged as the best technical surgeon in
the British Isles. While Lister was reserved and modest, Syme (then in his
fifties) was obstinate and intense, but perhaps the men “saw a submerged
part of his own personality in the other, and allowed a secret admiration of
his unconscious alter ego to forge a deep friendship.”^16 Lister flourished
in Edinburgh, furthering the Hunterian tradition of British surgeon-
scientists from the antecedent century, writing his father that he couldn’t
“conceive what a high degree of enjoyment I am from day to day
experiencing in this bloody and butchery department of the healing art.”^17
Lister was hired as Syme’s house surgeon (forerunner to Halsted’s
surgical residency), and after a year and a half, became assistant surgeon
to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in 1855. Edinburgh was at the very
forefront of medicine and surgery in the mid–19th century. With Paris,
Berlin, and Vienna vying for world supremacy, physicians in Edinburgh
first demonstrated chloroform anesthesia in 1847, within months of ether’s
discovery in Boston. (Late in life, Lister recalled that he witnessed
Europe’s first operation under ether in December 1846, in London,
probably cementing his resolution to become a surgeon.) Surgeons,
numbed to the cries and protestations of agonized patients, suddenly found
themselves sovereign over the afflicted, thus creating new possibilities for
cure. The Oxford English Dictionary defines frontier as “the extreme limit
of settled land beyond which lies wilderness,” and for the first time in
mankind’s existence, the frontier boundary of awareness had been
demolished, galvanizing Lister in Edinburgh and Billroth in Vienna into
exploration of the wilderness of the deeper parts of the body.
Fortuitously for all involved, Joseph Lister was spending increasingly
more time at the Syme home, befriending the eldest daughter Agnes. In
1856, Joseph and Agnes were married, beginning an almost forty-year
relationship, which, although it bore no children, was based on shared
scientific interests, with Agnes serving as his most important critic, editor,
research assistant, and travel companion. The newlyweds traveled to Paris,