Padua, Bologna, and Vienna, visiting the great thinkers and leading
hospitals, before settling back in Edinburgh, microscope at the ready.
While in Vienna, Lister went to the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, meeting
with Semmelweis’s former colleagues, but it is unknown if his story or
observations were a topic of discussion.
Lister plunged into work in Edinburgh, balancing his young surgical
practice, teaching obligations, assistantship to Syme, new marriage, and
most critically, his burgeoning research laboratory. For years, his lab was
in his own kitchen, with Agnes helping investigate blood coagulation,
physiology of nerve and muscle fibers, lymph flow, and inflammation.
Lister (and Agnes) gathered animals from local fields, parks, and streams,
procuring organs from slaughterhouses, slicing, staining, and
microscopically evaluating the structures and guessing about their
function. In 1860, the Listers moved westward to Glasgow, Scotland,
where, for a decade, Lister’s momentous discoveries took place.
Lister fully threw himself into research on inflammation. Logicians had
reasoned that contagions result from living organisms, and not just foul-
smelling, or noxious, air. Lister was becoming convinced that putrefaction
of wounds was due to some invisible thing that resided in the air and made
its way into open wounds. Reading in English, as well as the French- and
German-language journals, Lister encountered Jacob Henle, the influential
professor from Göttingen, Germany, who reasoned that contagions had to
be organic, that is to say, of living microscopic material.
Venereal disease was always a topic of interest to germ theorists. The
early Renaissance scientists could never deduce the source of plague,
typhoid fever, smallpox, or cholera outbreaks. Random persons always
seemed to be affected, and prior to the analytical tools of epidemiology, it
was simply too difficult to ascertain the germinal source of epidemics. But
every European doctor had encountered gonorrhea, herpes, (and since the
conquest of the Western Hemisphere) syphilis; everyone knew that virgins
never contracted those types of venereal diseases that resulted in sores,
scabs, scars, pus, boils, and all sorts of effluvia and detritus on the privy
parts of the licentious citizenry (whom Lister described as having an
“inclination to venery,”^18 or sexual indulgence). Venereal diseases,
therefore, could not be spread through the air, and it didn’t demand genius
insight that (like procreation) it was ejaculate and the fluids shared during