page_title: Joseph Lister
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Lister / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Residents at the Old Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, summer 1854: left to right, John Beddoe (seated left), John Kirk (back row), Joseph Lister (seated in front row), Pringle (back row), David Christison (seated), Patrick Heron Watson (back row), Alexander Struthers (seated right). Photograph. Iconographic Collections Keywords: Patrick Heron Watson; portrait photographs; Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.; John Beddoe; John Kirk; David Christison; Joseph Lister; George Hogarth Pringle; Alexander Struthers
context_page_description: Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister KCVO, OM, PC, PRS, FRCSE, FFPS, was a British surgeon and a pioneer of antiseptic surgery. From a technical viewpoint, Lister was not an exceptional surgeon, but his research into bacteriology and infection in wounds raised his operative technique to a new plane where his observations, deductions and practices revolutionised surgery throughout the world.
  Lister promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Lister successfully introduced carbolic acid to sterilise surgical instruments and to clean wounds.
  Applying Louis Pasteur's advances in microbiology, Lister championed the use of carbolic acid as an antiseptic, so that it became the first widely used antiseptic in surgery. He first suspected it would prove an adequate disinfectant because it was used to ease the stench from fields irrigated with sewage waste. He presumed it was safe because fields treated with carbolic acid produced no apparent ill-effects on the livestock that later grazed upon them.
  Lister's work led to a reduction in post-operative infections and made surgery safer for patients, distinguishing him as the "father of modern surgery".
context_section_description: Lister was born to a prosperous Quaker family in the village of Upton, West Ham, Essex, then near but now in London, England. He was the second son of six siblings to gentleman scientist and port wine merchant Joseph Jackson Lister who was in partnership with Thomas Barton Beck, of Tokenhouse Yard, the grandfather of Marcus Beck. Listers mother was Isabella Lister née Harris, the youngest daughter of master mariner Anthony Harris.Before she was married, Isabella worked at the Ackworth School, a Quaker school for the poor, assisting her widowed mother who was the superintendent of the school.
  His father was a pioneer in the design of achromatic object lenses for use in compound microscopes.  His father spent 30 years of his life perfecting the microscope, and in the process, discovered the Law of Aplanatic Foci, building a microscope where the image point of one lens coincided with the focal point of another. Up until that point, the best higher magnification lenses produced an excessive secondary aberration known as a coma which interfered with normal use. His work built a reputation sufficient to enable his being elected to the Royal Society in 1832.
caption: Lister with fellow Residents at the Old Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, c. 1855 (Lister is in the front row with his hands clasped)
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