title: Destruction under the Mongol Empire

text: Those who agreed to pay the Mongols tribute were spared invasion and left relatively independent. While populations resisting were usually annihilated and so did not pay a regular tribute, exceptions to the rule included the Goryeo dynasty of Korea, which finally agreed to pay regular tributes in exchange for vassaldom and some measure of autonomy as well as the retention of the ruling dynasty, further emphasizing the Mongol preference for tribute and vassals, which would serve as a somewhat regular and continuous source of income, as opposed to outright conquest and destruction.


title: Destruction under the Mongol Empire

text: Different tributes were taken from different cultures. For instance, Goryeo was assessed at 10,000 otter skins, 20,000 horses, 10,000 bolts of silk, clothing for soldiers, and a large number of children and artisans as slaves.


title: Destruction under the Mongol Empire

text: According to a study by the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Energy, the annihilation of so many human beings and cities under Genghis Khan may have scrubbed as much as 700 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere by allowing forests to regrow on previously populated and cultivated land.


title: Messalina

text: Valeria Messalina (; ) was the third wife of Roman emperor Claudius. She was a paternal cousin of Emperor Nero, a second cousin of Emperor Caligula, and a great-grandniece of Emperor Augustus. A powerful and influential woman with a reputation for promiscuity, she allegedly conspired against her husband and was executed on the discovery of the plot. Her notorious reputation probably resulted from political bias, but works of art and literature have perpetuated it into modern times.


title: Messalina

text: Messalina was the daughter of Domitia Lepida and her first cousin Marcus Valerius Messalla Barbatus. Her mother was the youngest child of the consul Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus and Antonia Major. Her mother's brother, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, had been the first husband of the future Empress Agrippina the Younger and the biological father of the future Emperor Nero, making Nero Messalina's first cousin despite a seventeen-year age difference. Messalina's grandmothers Claudia Marcella the Younger and Antonia the Elder were half sisters. Claudia Marcella Minor, Messalina's paternal grandmother, was the daughter of Augustus' sister Octavia the Younger. Antonia Major, Messalina's maternal grandmother, was the elder daughter of Octavia by her marriage to Mark Antony, and was Claudius' maternal aunt. There was, therefore, a large amount of inbreeding in the family.


title: Messalina

text: Little is known about Messalina's life prior to her marriage in 38 to Claudius, her first cousin once removed, who was then about 47 years old. Two children were born as a result of their union: a daughter Claudia Octavia (born 39 or 40), a future empress, stepsister and first wife to the emperor Nero; and a son, Britannicus. When the Emperor Caligula was murdered in 41, the Praetorian Guard proclaimed Claudius the new emperor and Messalina became empress.


title: Messalina

text: After her accession to power, Messalina enters history with a reputation as ruthless, predatory and sexually insatiable, while Claudius is painted as easily led by her and unconscious of her many adulteries. The historians who relayed such stories, principally Tacitus and Suetonius, wrote some 70 years after the events in an environment hostile to the imperial line to which Messalina had belonged. There was also the later Greek account of Cassius Dio who, writing a century and a half after the period described, was dependent on the received account of those before him. It has also been observed of his attitude throughout his work that he was "suspicious of women". Neither can Suetonius be regarded as trustworthy. "Encyclopaedia Britannica" suggests of his fictive approach that he was "free with scandalous gossip," and that "he used 'characteristic anecdote' without exhaustive inquiry into its authenticity." He manipulates the facts to suit his thesis.


title: Messalina

text: Tacitus himself claimed to be transmitting "what was heard and written by my elders" but without naming sources other than the memoirs of Agrippina the Younger, who had arranged to displace Messalina's children in the imperial succession and was therefore particularly interested in blackening her predecessor's name. Examining his narrative style and comparing it to that of the satires of Juvenal, another critic remarks on "how the writers manipulate it in order to skew their audience's perception of Messalina". Indeed, Tacitus seems well aware of the impression he is creating when he admits that his account may seem fictional, if not melodramatic ("fabulosus"). It has therefore been argued that the chorus of condemnation against Messalina from these writers is largely a result of the political sanctions that followed her death, although some authors have still seen "something of substance beyond mere invention".


title: Messalina

text: The accusations against Messalina center largely on three areas: her treatment of other members of the imperial family; her treatment of members of the senatorial order; and her unrestrained sexual behaviour. Her husband's family, especially female, seemed to be specially targeted by Messalina. Within the first year of Claudius' reign, his niece Julia Livilla, only recently recalled from banishment upon the death of her brother Caligula, was exiled again on charges of adultery with Seneca the Younger. Claudius ordered her execution soon after, while Seneca was allowed to return seven years later, following the death of Messalina. Another niece, Julia Livia, was attacked for immorality and incest by Messalina in 43possibly because she feared Julia's son Rubellius Plautus as a rival claimant to the imperial succession,with the result that Claudius ordered her execution.


title: Messalina

text: In the final two years of her life, she also intensified her attacks on her husband's only surviving niece, Agrippina the Younger, and Agrippina's young son Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (the later Emperor Nero). The public sympathized with Agrippina, who had twice been exiled and was the only surviving daughter of Germanicus after Messalina won the execution of Julia Livia. Agrippina was implicated in the alleged crimes of Statilius Taurus, whom it was alleged she directed to partake in "magical and superstitious practices". Taurus committed suicide, and, according to Tacitus, Messalina was only prevented from further persecuting Agrippina because she was distracted by her new lover, Gaius Silius.


title: Messalina

text: According to Suetonius, Messalina realized early on that the young Nero could be a potential rival to her own son, who was three years younger. He repeated a tale that Messalina sent several assassins into Nero's bedchamber to murder him, but they were frightened off by what they thought was a snake slithering out from under his bed. In the Secular Games of 48, Nero won greater applause from the crowd than did Messalina's own son Britannicus, something which scholars have speculated led Messalina to plot against Nero and his mother once and for all.


title: Messalina

text: Two very prominent senators, Appius Silanus and Valerius Asiaticus, also met their death on the instigation of Messalina. The former was married to Messalina's mother Domitia Lepida, but according to Dio and Tacitus, Messalina coveted him for herself. In 42, Messalina and the freedman Narcissus devised an elaborate ruse, whereby they each informed Claudius that they had had identical dreams during the night portending that Silanus would murder Claudius. When Silanus arrived that morning (after being summoned by either Messalina or Narcissus), he confirmed their portent and Claudius had him executed.


title: Messalina

text: Valerius Asiaticus was one of Messalina's final victims. Asiaticus was immensely rich and incurred Messalina's wrath because he owned the Gardens of Lucullus, which she desired for herself, and because he was the lover of her hated rival Poppaea Sabina the Elder, with whom she was engaged in a fierce rivalry over the affections of the actor Mnester. In 46, she convinced Claudius to order his arrest on charges of failing to maintain discipline amongst his soldiers, adultery with Sabina, and for engaging in homosexual acts. Although Claudius hesitated to condemn him to death, he ultimately did so on the recommendation of Messalina's ally, and Claudius' partner in the consulship for that year, Lucius Vitellius. The murder of Asiaticus, without notifying the senate and without trial, caused great outrage amongst the senators, who blamed both Messalina and Claudius. Despite this, Messalina continued to target Poppaea Sabina until she committed suicide.


title: Messalina

text: The same year as the execution of Asiaticus, Messalina ordered the poisoning of Marcus Viniciusbecause he refused to sleep with her according to gossip. About this time she also arranged for the execution of one of Claudius' freedmen secretaries, Polybius. According to Dio, this murder of one of their own turned the other freedmen, previously her close allies, against Messalina for good.


title: Messalina

text: In 48 AD, Claudius went to Ostia to visit the new harbor he was constructing and was informed while there that Messalina had gone so far as to marry her latest lover, Senator Gaius Silius in Rome. It was only when Messalina held a costly wedding banquet in Claudius' absence that the freedman Narcissus decided to inform him. The exact motivations for Messalina's actions are unknownit has been interpreted as a move to overthrow Claudius and install Silius as Emperor, with Silius adopting Britannicus and thereby ensuring her son's future accession. Other historians have speculated that Silius convinced Messalina that Claudius' overthrow was inevitable, and her best hopes of survival lay in a union with him. Tacitus stated that Messalina hesitated even as Silius insisted on marriage, but ultimately conceded because "she coveted the name of wife", and because Silius had divorced his own wife the previous year in anticipation of a union with Messalina. Another theory is that Messalina and Silius merely took part in a sham marriage as part of a Bacchic ritual as they were in the midst of celebrating the Vinalia, a festival of the grape harvest.


title: Messalina

text: Tacitus and Dio state that Narcissus convinced Claudius that it was a move to overthrow him and persuaded him to appoint the deputy Praetorian Prefect, Lusius Geta, to the charge of the Guard because the loyalty of the senior Prefect Rufrius Crispinus was in doubt. Claudius rushed back to Rome, where he was met by Messalina on the road with their children. The leading Vestal Virgin, Vibidia, came to entreat Claudius not to rush to condemn Messalina. He then visited the house of Silius, where he found a great many heirlooms of his Claudii and Drusii forebears, taken from his house and gifted to Silius by Messalina. When Messalina attempted to gain access to her husband in the palace, she was repulsed by Narcissus and shouted down with a list of her various offences compiled by the freedman. Despite the mounting evidence against her, Claudius's feelings were softening and he asked to see her in the morning for a private interview. Narcissus, pretending to act on Claudius' instructions, ordered an officer of the Praetorian Guard to execute her. When the troop of guards arrived at the Gardens of Lucullus, where Messalina had taken refuge with her mother, she was given the honorable option of taking her own life. Unable to muster the courage to slit her own throat, she was run through with a sword by one of the guards. Upon hearing the news, the Emperor did not react and simply asked for another chalice of wine. The Roman Senate then ordered a "damnatio memoriae" so that Messalina's name would be removed from all public and private places and all statues of her would be taken down.


title: Messalina

text: In Messalina's time, the condemnation of "damnatio memoriae" followed on an offence within the context of the Roman imperial cult. The cult was directed from above by members of the imperial circle through official initiatives within the pro-imperial power structure. It was effective among the wider public, however, only insofar as there was personal assent. Theoretically the sentence of "damnatio memoriae" was supposed to erase all mention of the offender from the public sphere. The person's name was gouged from inscriptions and even from coinage. Sculptures might be smashed or at the very least would be dismounted and stored away out of sight.


title: Messalina

text: Such measures were not totally effective and several images of Messalina have survived for one reason or another. One such is the doubtfully ascribed bust in the Uffizi Gallery that may in fact be of Agrippina, Messalina's successor as wife of Claudius (see above). Another in the Louvre is thought to be of Messalina holding her child Britannicus. In fact it is based on a famous Greek sculpture by Cephisodotus the Elder of Eirene carrying the child Ploutos, of which there were other Roman imitations.


title: Messalina

text: Some of the surviving engraved gems that feature Messalina were also indebted to ancient Greek models. They include the carved sardonyx of Messalina accompanied by Claudius in a dragon chariot, which commemorated his part in the Roman conquest of Britain. This was modelled on depictions of Dionysus and Ariadne after his Indian victory and is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Cabinet des Médailles). In its Roman adaptation, Messalina is in front guiding the chariot while Claudius stands behind her steadying his flying robe. The piece was once in the collection of Peter Paul Rubens, who made an ink sketch of it, although identifying the woman erroneously as Agrippina. However, there is another version of this victory celebration known as the Hague cameo, which may be a later imitation. In a chariot drawn by centaurs, the laurel-wreathed Messalina reclines in the post of honour, bearing the attributes of Ceres. Beside her sits Claudius with one arm about her neck and Jupiter's thunderbolt in his other hand. In front stands the child Britannicus in complete armour, with his elder sister Octavia next to him.


title: Messalina

text: Yet another carved sardonyx now in the national library of France represents a bust of the laureled Messalina, with on either side of her the heads of her son and daughter emerging from a cornucopia. This too once belonged to Rubens and a Flemish engraving after his drawing of it is in the British Museum. A simple white portrait bust of the empress is also held by the Bibliothèque nationale. A portrait oval in yellow carnelian was once recorded as being in the collection of Lord Montague; another in sardonyx once belonged to the Antikensammlung Berlin.


title: Messalina

text: Two authors especially supplemented the gossip and officially dictated versions recorded by later historians and added to Messalina's notoriety. One such story is the account of her all-night sex competition with a prostitute in Book X of Pliny the Elder's "Natural History", according to which the competition lasted for 24 hours and Messalina won with a score of 25 partners.


title: Messalina

text: The poet Juvenal mentions Messalina twice in his satires. As well as the story in his tenth satire that she compelled Gaius Silius to divorce his wife and marry her, the sixth satire contains the notorious description of how the Empress used to work clandestinely all night in a brothel under the name of the She-Wolf. In the course of that account, Juvenal coined the phrase frequently applied to Messalina thereafter, "meretrix augusta" (the imperial whore). In so doing, he coupled her reputation with that of Cleopatra, another victim of imperially directed character assassination, whom the poet Propertius had earlier described as "meretrix regina" (the harlot queen).


title: Messalina

text: The earlier propaganda against Cleopatra is described as "rooted in the hostile Roman literary tradition". Similar literary tactics, including the suggestive mingling of historical fact and gossip in the officially approved annals, is what has helped prolong the scandalous reputation of Messalina as well.


title: Messalina

text: To call a woman "a Messalina" indicates a devious and sexually voracious personality. The historical figure and her fate were often used in the arts to make a moral point, but there was often as well a prurient fascination with her sexually-liberated behaviour. In modern times, that has led to exaggerated works which have been described as romps.


title: Messalina

text: The ambivalent attitude to Messalina can be seen in the late mediaeval French prose work in the J. Paul Getty Museum illustrated by the Master of Boucicaut, "Tiberius, Messalina, and Caligula reproach one another in the midst of flames". It recounts a dialogue that takes place in hell between the three characters from the same imperial line. Messalina wins the debate by demonstrating that their sins were far worse than hers and suggests that they repent of their own wickedness before reproaching her as they had done.


title: Messalina

text: While Messalina's wicked behavior towards others is given full emphasis, and even exaggerated in early works, her sexual activities have been treated more sympathetically. In the 1524 illustrations of 16 sexual positions known as "I Modi", each was named after a couple from Classical history or myth, which included "Messalina in the Booth of Lisisca". Although early editions were destroyed by religious censorship, Agostino Caracci's later copies have survived (see above).


title: Messalina

text: Other artistic illustrations of Messalina's reported depravity, supposedly based on ancient medals and cameos, appear in the works of Pierre-François Hugues d'Hancarville. His main account, padded with more general quotations condemning the laxity of the times, takes up three chapters of his "Monuments of the Private Lives of the Twelve Caesars" (1780). Chapter 29 deals with Messalina's public marriage to Gaius Silius. The following chapters are illustrated by cameos ascribed to a certain Pythodorus of Trallès. In the first, Messalina sits naked while a maid dresses her hair in preparation for taking up her role as the courtesan Lisisica; in the other she offers fourteen myrtle wreaths to Priapus following her triumph in exhausting as many fit young men in a sexual contest. She also sits before a private shrine to Priapus in an illustration for the author's other pornographic work, "Monuments of the Secret Cult of Roman Women" (1787).


title: Messalina

text: One of the avenues to drawing a moral lesson from the story of Messalina in painting was to picture her violent end. An early example was Francesco Solimena's "The Death of Messalina" (1708). In this scene of vigorous action, a Roman soldier pulls back his arm to stab the Empress while fending off her mother. A witness in armour observes calmly from the shadows in the background. Georges Rochegrosse's painting of 1916 is a reprise of the same scene. A mourning woman dressed in black leaves with her face covered as a soldier drags back Messalina's head, watched by a courtier with the order for execution in his hand. The Danish royal painter Nicolai Abildgaard, however, preferred to feature "The Dying Messalina and her Mother" (1797) in a quieter setting. The mother weeps beside her daughter as she lies extended on the ground in a garden setting.


title: Messalina

text: In 1870 the French committee for the Prix de Rome set Messalina's death as the competition subject for that year. The winning entry by Fernand Lematte, "The Death of Messalina", is based on the description of the occasion by Tacitus. Following the decision that she must die, "Evodus, one of the freedmen, was appointed to watch and complete the affair. Hurrying on before with all speed to the gardens, he found Messalina stretched upon the ground, while by her side sat Lepida, her mother, who, though estranged from her daughter in prosperity, was now melted to pity by her inevitable doom, and urged her not to wait for the executioner". In Messalina's hand is the thin dagger that she dare not use, while Evodus bends over her threateningly and Lepida tries to fend him off. In an earlier French treatment by , the lesson of poetic justice is made plainer by specifically identifying the scene of Messalina's death as the garden which she had obtained by having its former owner executed on a false charge. Now she crouches at the foot of a wall carved with the name of Lucullus and is condemned by the dark-clothed intermediary as a soldier advances on her drawing his sword.


title: Messalina

text: Two Low Countries painters emphasised the behaviour of Messalina that led up to her end by picturing her wedding with Gaius Silius. The one by Nicolaus Knüpfer, dated about 1650, is so like contemporary brothel scenes that its subject is ambiguous and has been disputed. A richly dressed drunkard lies back on a bed between two women while companions look anxiously out of the window and another struggles to draw his sword. The later "Landscape with Messalina's Wedding" by Victor Honoré Janssens pictures the seated empress being attired before the ceremony. Neither scene looks much like a wedding, but rather they indicate the age's sense of moral outrage at this travesty of marriage. That was further underlined by a contemporary Tarot card in which card 6, normally titled "The Lover(s)", has been retitled "Shameless" (impudique) and pictures Messalina leaning against a carved chest. Beneath is the explanation that "she reached such a point of insolence that, because of the stupidity of her husband, she dared to marry a young Roman publicly in the Emperor's absence".


title: Messalina

text: The wild scenes following the wedding that took place in Rome are dramatised by Tacitus. "Messalina meanwhile, more wildly profligate than ever, was celebrating in mid-autumn a representation of the vintage in her new home. The presses were being trodden; the vats were overflowing; women girt with skins were dancing, as Bacchanals dance in their worship or their frenzy. Messalina with flowing hair shook the thyrsus, and Silius at her side, crowned with ivy and wearing the buskin, moved his head to some lascivious chorus". Such was the scene of drunken nudity painted by in 1905.


title: Messalina

text: Other artists show similar scenes of debauchery or, like the Italian A. Pigma in "When Claudius is away, Messalina will play" (1911), hint that it will soon follow. What was to follow is depicted in Federico Faruffini's "The orgies of Messalina" (1867–1868). A more private liaison is treated in Joaquín Sorolla's "Messalina in the Arms of the Gladiator" (1886). This takes place in an interior, with the empress reclining bare breasted against the knees of a naked gladiator.


title: Messalina

text: Juvenal's account of her nights spent in the brothel is commonly portrayed. Gustave Moreau painted her leading another man onto the bed while an exhausted prostitute sleeps in the background, while in Paul Rouffio's painting of 1875 she reclines bare-breasted as a slave offers grapes. The Dane Peder Severin Krøyer depicted her standing, her full body apparent under the thin material of her dress. The ranks of her customers are just visible behind the curtain against which she stands (see above). Two drawings by Aubrey Beardsley were produced for a private printing of Juvenal's satires (1897). The one titled "Messalina and her companion" showed her on the way to the brothel, while a rejected drawing is usually titled "Messalina returning from the bath". About that period, too, Roman resident Pavel Svedomsky reimagined the historical scene. There the disguised seductress is at work in a light-suffused alley, enticing a passer-by into the brothel from which a maid looks out anxiously.


title: Messalina

text: Alternatively, artists drew on Pliny's account of her sex competition. The Brazilian Henrique Bernardelli (1857–1936) showed her lying across the bed at the moment of exhaustion afterwards. So also did Eugène Cyrille Brunet's dramatic marble sculpture, dating from 1884 (see above), while in the Czech Jan Štursa's standing statue of 1912 she is holding a last piece of clothing by her side at the outset.


title: Messalina

text: One of the earliest stage productions to feature the fall of the empress was "The Tragedy of Messalina" (1639) by Nathanael Richards, where she is depicted as a monster and used as a foil to attack the Roman Catholic wife of the English king Charles I. She is treated as equally villainous in the Venetian Pietro Zaguri's "La Messalina" (1656). This was a 4-act prose tragedy with four songs, described as an "opera scenica", that revolved around the affair with Gaius Silius that brought about her death. Carlo Pallavicino was to follow with a full blown Venetian opera in 1679 that combined eroticism with morality.


title: Messalina

text: During the last quarter of the 19th century the idea of the femme fatale came into prominence and encouraged many more works featuring Messalina. 1874 saw the Austrian verse tragedy "Arria und Messalina" by Adolf Wilbrandt which was staged with success across Europe for many years. It was followed in 1877 by Pietro Cossa's Italian verse tragedy, where Messalina figures as a totally unrestrained woman in pursuit of love. Another 5-act verse tragedy was published in Philadelphia in 1890, authored by Algernon Sydney Logan (1849–1925), who had liberal views on sex.


title: Messalina

text: As well as plays, the story of Messalina was adapted to ballet and opera. The 1878 ballet by Luigi Danesi (1832-1908) to music by Giuseppe Giaquinto (d. 1881) was an Italian success with several productions. On its arrival in France in 1884 it was made a fantastical spectacle at the Éden-Théâtre, with elephants, horses, massive crowd scenes and circus games in which rows of bare-legged female gladiators preceded the fighters. Isidore de Lara's opera "Messaline", based on a 4-act verse tragedy by Armand Silvestre and Eugène Morand, centred upon the love of the empress for a poet and then his gladiator brother. It opened in Monte Carlo in 1899 and went on to Covent Garden. The ailing Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec saw the Bordeaux production and was inspired to paint six scenes from it, including Messalina descending a staircase, seated while a bearded character in a dark tunic stands to one side, or the same character stands and kneels before her, as well as resting extras. Later there was also an Italian production of the opera in translation.


title: Messalina

text: In 2009 the theme was updated by Benjamin Askew in his UK play "In Bed With Messalina", which features her final hours.


title: Messalina

text: From the last quarter of the 19th century onwards, the role of Messalina has been as much about the stardom of those who played her as about the social message of the works in which she appeared. The star's name appeared in large print on the posters of the works in which she played. She was constantly featured in the gossip columns. Her role was iconised photographically, copies of which she often inscribed for her admirers. Pictures of her as Messalina adorned the theatre magazines and were sold in their thousands as postcards. This was as true in drama and opera as it was of those who portrayed the empress in movies and television films or miniseries. The role itself added to or established their reputations. And, with the growing permissiveness of modern times, that might rather amount to notoriety for those adult films in which athletic stamina was more of a requirement than acting ability.


title: Messalina

text: Wilbrandt's "Arria und Messalina" was specially written for Charlotte Wolter, who was painted in her role by Hans Makart in 1875. There she reclines on a chaise-longue as the lights of Rome burn in the background. As well as a preparatory photograph of her dressed as in the painting, there were also posed cabinet photos of her in a plainer dress. Other stars were involved when the play went on tour in various translations. Lilla Bulyovszkyné (1833–1909) starred in the Hungarian production in 1878 and Irma Temesváryné-Farkas in that of 1883; Louise Fahlman (1856–1918) played in the 1887 Stockholm production, Marie Pospíšilová (1862–1943) in the 1895 Czech production.


title: Messalina

text: Both the Parisian leads in Danesi's ballet were photographed by Nadar: Elena Cornalba in 1885 and Mlle Jaeger later. During its 1898 production in Turin, Anita Grassi was the lead.


title: Messalina

text: Meyriane Héglon starred in the Monte Carlo and subsequent London productions of De Lara's "Messaline", while Emma Calvé starred in the 1902 Paris production, where she was succeeded by Cécile Thévenet. Others who sang in the role were Maria Nencioni in 1903, Jeanne Dhasty in the Nancy (1903) and Algiers (1907) productions, Charlotte Wyns (1868–) in the 1904 Aix les Bains production, and Claire Croiza, who made her debut in the 1905 productions in Nancy and Lille.


title: Messalina

text: After a slow start in the first half of the 20th century, the momentum of films about or featuring Messalina increased with censorship's decline. The following starred in her part:


title: Messalina

text: An early fiction concerning the Empress, "La Messalina" by Francesco Pona, appeared in Venice in 1633. This managed to combine a high degree of eroticism with a demonstration of how private behavior has a profound effect on public affairs. Nevertheless, a passage such as


title: Messalina

text: helps explain how the novel was at once among the most popular, and the most frequently banned, books of the century, despite its moral pretensions.


title: Messalina

text: Much the same point about the catastrophic effect of sexuality was made by Gregorio Leti's political pamphlet, "The amours of Messalina, late queen of Albion, in which are briefly couch'd secrets of the imposture of the Cambrion prince, the Gothick league, and other court intrigues of the four last years reign, not yet made publick" (1689). This was yet another satire on a Stuart Queen, Mary of Modena in this case, camouflaged behind the character of Messalina.


title: Messalina

text: A very early treatment in English of Messalina's liaison with Gaius Silius and her subsequent death appeared in the fictionalised story included in the American author Edward Maturin's "Sejanus And Other Roman Tales" (1839). But the part she plays in Robert Graves' novels, "I, Claudius" and "Claudius the God" (1934–35), is better known. In it she is portrayed as a teenager at the time of her marriage but credited with all the actions mentioned in the ancient sources. An attempt to create a film based on them in 1937 failed, but they were adapted into a very successful TV series in 1976.


title: Messalina

text: In 19th century France, the story of Messalina was subject to literary transformation. It underlaid "La femme de Claude" (Claudius' wife, 1873), the novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, where the hero is Claude Ruper, an embodiment of the French patriotic conscience after the country's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. In contrast, his wife Césarine (the female Caesar) is a creature totally corrupt at all levels, who sells her husband's work to the enemy and is eventually shot by him. Alfred Jarry's 'pataphysical' novel "Messaline" of 1901 (titled "The Garden of Priapus" in Louis Colman's English translation), though lightly based on the historical account, is chiefly the product of the author's fanciful and extravagant imagination and has been compared with the treatment of Classical themes by Art Nouveau artists.


title: Messalina

text: In fact, Jarry's was just one of five contemporary French novels treating Messalina in a typically fin de siècle manner. They also included Prosper Castanier's "L'Orgie Romaine" (Roman Orgy, 1897), Nonce Casanova's "Messaline, roman de la Rome impériale" (Mesalina, a novel of imperial Rome, 1902) and Louis Dumont's "La Chimère, Pages de la Décadence" (The Chimaera, Decadent Pages, 1902). However, the most successful and inventive stylistically was Felicien Champsaur's novel "L'Orgie Latine" (1903) Although Messalina is referenced throughout its episodic coverage of degenerate times, she features particularly in the third section, "The Naked Empress" ("L'impératice nue"), dealing with her activities in the brothel, and the sixth, "Messalina's End", beginning with her wedding to Silius and ending with her enforced death.


title: Messalina

text: Sensational fictional treatments have persisted, as in Vivian Crockett's "Messalina, the wickedest woman in Rome" (1924), Alfred Schirokauer's "Messalina – Die Frau des Kaisers" (Caesar's wife, 1928), Marise Querlin's "Messaline, impératrice du feu" (The fiery empress, 1955), Jack Oleck's "Messalina: a novel of imperial Rome" (1959) and Siegfried Obermeier's "Messalina, die lasterhafte Kaiserin" (The empress without principle, 2002). Oleck's novel went through many editions and was later joined by Kevin Matthews' "The Pagan Empress" (1964). Both have since been included under the genre "toga porn". They are rivalled by Italian and French adult comics, sometimes of epic proportions, such as the 59 episodes devoted to Messalina in the Italian Venus of Rome series (1967–74). More recent examples include Jean-Yves Mitton's four-part series in France (2011–13) and Thomas Mosdi's "Messaline" in the Succubus series (#4, 2014), in which "a woman without taboos or scruples throws light on pitiless ancient Rome".


title: Messalina

text: Contrasting views have lately been provided by two French biographies. Jacqueline Dauxois gives the traditional picture in her lurid biography in Pygmalion's Legendary Queens series (2013), while the historian Jean-Noël Castorio (b.1971) seeks to uncover the true facts of the woman behind Juvenal's 6th satire in his revisionist "Messaline, la putain impériale" (The imperial whore, 2015).


title: Joseph Lister

text: Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister, (5 April 182710 February 1912) was a British surgeon, medical scientist, experimental pathologist and a pioneer of antiseptic surgery and preventative medicine. Joseph Lister revolutionised the craft of surgery in the same manner that John Hunter revolutionised the science of surgery.


title: Joseph Lister

text: 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.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister's contribution to the fields of physiology, pathology and surgery were four-fold. He promoted the principle of antiseptic surgical care and wound management while working as a surgeon at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary by successfully introducing phenol (then known as carbolic acid) to sterilise surgical instruments, the patient's skin, sutures, the surgeon's hands and the ward. Secondly he researched the role of inflammation and tissue perfusion on the healing of wounds. Thirdly, he advanced diagnostic science by the microscopic analysis of speciments. Fourthly, he devised elegant strategies to increase the chances of survival after surgery. However, his most important contribution was recognising the key principle that underlay the change in surgical practice, namely converting a chance observation into a meaningful application of the scientific principles proposed by Louis Pasteur This was relating Pasteur's germ theory of fermentation to the origin of putrefaction in wounds.


title: Joseph Lister

text: 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".


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister was born to a prosperous, educated Quaker family in the village of Upton, West Ham, Essex, then near but now in London, England. He was the fourth child and second son of four sons and three daughters born to gentleman scientist and port wine merchant Joseph Jackson Lister and school assistant Isabella Lister née Harris. On 14 July 1818, couple were married in a ceremony in Ackworth, West Yorkshire.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister's paternal great-great-grandfather, Thomas Lister, was the last of several generations of farmers who lived in Bingley in West Yorkshire. Lister joined the Society of Friends as a young man and passed his beliefs on to his son, Joseph Lister. He moved to London in 1720 to open a tobacconist in Aldersgate Street in the City of London. His son, John Lister (1737–1835) was born there. Lister's grandfather's was apprenticed to a watchmaker, Isaac Rogers, in 1752 and followed that trade on his own account in Bell Alley, Lombard Street from 1759 to 1766. He then took over his father's tobacco business, but gave it up in 1769 in favour of working at his father-in-law Stephen Jackson's business as a wine-merchant at No 28 Old Wine and Brandy Values on Lothbury Street, opposite Tokenhouse Yard.


title: Joseph Lister

text: His father was a pioneer in the design of achromatic object lenses for use in compound microscopes He spent 30 years 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. It was considered a major advance that elevated histology into an independent science. By 1832, Lister's work had built a reputation sufficient to enable his being elected to the Royal Society. His mother, Isabella, was the youngest daughter of master mariner Anthony Harris. Isabella worked at the Ackworth School, a Quaker school for the poor, assisting her widowed mother who was the superintendent of the school.


title: Joseph Lister

text: The eldest daughter of the couple was Mary Lister (1820–1894), eldest sister to Joseph Lister. On 21 August 1851, she married the barrister Rickman Godlee of Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple, who belonged to the friends meeting house in Plaistow. The couple had six children. Their second child was Rickman Godlee (1849–1925), a neurosurgeon, who became Professor of Clinical Surgery at the University College Hospital. and surgeon to Queen Victoria. He became Lister's biographer in 1917. The eldest son of Joseph and Isabella Lister was John Lister (1822–1846), who died of a painful brain tumour. With John's passing, Joseph became the heir of the family. The couple's second daughter was Isabella Sophia Lister (1823–1870), who married the Irish Quaker Thomas Pim in 1848. Lister's other brother was William Henry Lister (1828–1850) who died after a long illness. The youngest son of the couple was Arthur Lister (1830–1908), a wine merchant, botanist and lifelong Quaker, who studied Mycetozoa. He worked alongside his daughter Gulielma Lister to produce the standard monograph on Mycetozoa and both were awarded Fellowship of the Royal Society. The couple's last child was Jane Lister (1832–1920); she married Smith Harrison, a wholesale tea merchant, who was marrying for a second time.


title: Joseph Lister

text: After their marriage, the Listers lived at 5 Tokenhouse Yard in Central London for three years until 1822, where they ran a port wine business in partnership with Thomas Barton Beck. Beck was the grandfather of the professor of surgery and proponent of the germ theory of disease, Marcus Beck, who would later promote Lister's discoveries in his fight to introduce antiseptics. In 1822, Lister's family moved to Stoke Newington. In 1826, the family moved to Upton House, a long low Queen Anne style mansion that came with 69 acres of land. It had been rebuilt in 1731, to suit the style of the period.


title: Joseph Lister

text: As a child, Lister attended Benjamin Abbott's Isaac Brown Academy, a private Quaker school in Hitchin in Hertfordshire. When Lister was older, he attended Grove House School in Tottenham, also a private Quaker School to study mathematics, natural science, and languages. His father was insistent that Lister received a good grounding in French and German, in the knowledge he would learn Latin at school. From an early age, Lister was strongly encouraged by his father. He became interested in natural history that led to dissections of small animals, fish and osteology, that were examined using his father's microscope and then be drawn using the camera lucida technique that his father had explained to him, or sketched. His father's interests in microscopical research, developed in Lister the determination to become a surgeon and prepared him for a life of scientific research.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister left school in the spring of 1844, when he was seventeen. He was unable to attend either University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge owing to the religious tests that effectively barred him. So he decided to apply to the non-sectarian University College London Medical School, one of only a few institutions in Great Britain that accepted Quakers at that time.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In 1844, just before Listers seventeenth birthday, he move to an apartment at 28 London Road that he shared with Edward Palmer, who was also a Quaker. Although his father wanted him to continue his general education, the university had demanded since 1837, that each student obtain a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree before commencing medical training. Lister matriculated in August 1846, initially studying arts. On 21 December 1846, Lister attended Robert Liston famous operation where ether was applied by Lister's classmate, William Squire, for the first time. to anaesthetise a patient In 1847, Lister and Palmer moved to 2 Bedford place and were joined by John Hodgkin, the nephew of Thomas Hodgkin who discovered Hodgkin lymphoma. Lister and Hodgkin had been school friends.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In 1847, Lister graduated with a degree with a distinction in classics and botany. While he was studying, Lister suffered from a mild bout of smallpox, a year after his elder brother died of the disease. The bereavement combined with the stress of his classes led to a nervous breakdown. In early 1848, Lister decided to take a long holiday in Ireland, to recuperate and this delayed the start of his medical studies at the university.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In October 1848, Lister registered as a medical student. During his studies, Lister was active in the University Debating Society and the Hospital Medical Society. In the autumn of 1849, he returned to college, bearing a gift of a microscope from his father.


title: Joseph Lister

text: His main lecturers were John Lindley (1799–1865) professor of botany, Thomas Graham (1805–1869) professor of chemistry, Robert Edmond Grant (1793–1874) professor of comparative anatomy, George Viner Ellis (1812–1900) professor of anatomy and William Benjamin Carpenter (1813–1885) professor of medical jurisprudence. Although Lister often spoke highly about Lindley and Graham in his writings, it was Wharton Jones (1808–1891) professor of ophthalmic medicine and surgery and William Sharpey (1802–1880) professor of physiology, who exercised the greatest influence on Lister. As a student, Lister was greatly attracted by Dr. Sharpey's lectures, which inspired in him a love of experimental physiology and histology that never left him.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Wharton Jones was praised by Thomas Henry Huxley for the method and quality of his physiology lectures. As a clinical scientist working in physiological sciences, he was foremost in the number of discoveries he made. He was also considered a brilliant ophthalmic surgeon, his main field. He conducted research into the circulation of the blood and phenomena of inflammation that was carried out on the frog's web and the bat's wing, and no doubt suggested this method of research to Lister. Sharpey was called the "father of modern physiology" as he was the first to give a series of lectures on the subject. Prior to that the field has been considered part of anatomy. Sharpey studied at Edinburgh university, then went to Paris to study clinical surgery under the French anatomist Guillaume Dupuytren and operative surgery under Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin. It was in Paris that Sharpey met Syme and became life-long friends. After moving to Edinburgh, he taught anatomy with Allen Thomson as his physiological colleague. He left Edinburgh in 1836, in order to become the first Professor of Physiology at University College, London


title: Joseph Lister

text: Before he qualified for his degree, Lister had to complete two years of clinical instruction. He began as an intern and then house physician to Walter Hayle Walshe (1812–1892). professor of pathological anatomy and author of 1846 study, "The Nature and Treatment of Cancer". Then in his second year in 1851, Lister became first a dresser in January 1851 then a house surgeon to John Eric Erichsen (1818–1896) in May 1851. Erichsen was professor of surgery and author of the 1853 "Science and Art of Surgery" described as one of the most celebrated textbooks on surgery in the English language. The book went through many editions, of which Marcus Beck edited the eighth and ninth editions, adding Lister's antiseptic techniques and Pasteur and Robert Koch's germ theory. It was while Lister worked for Erichsen, that his interest in the healing of wounds began.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister had only just begun working in his role as dresser to Erichsen in January 1851, when there was an epidemic of erysipelas in the male ward.


title: Joseph Lister

text: An infected patient who came from an Islington workhouse was left in Erichsen's surgical ward for two hours. The hospital had been free of infection but within days there were 12 cases of infection and 4 deaths. In his notebook, Lister stated that the disease was a form of surgical fever, and particularly noted that recent surgical patients were infected the worst, but those with older operations with suppurating wounds, 'mostly escaped'.


title: Joseph Lister

text: When he became a house surgeon, Lister had patients put in his charge. For the first time, he came into contact face-to-face with the various forms of blood-poisoning diseases like pyaemia and hospital gangrene, the disease that rots living tissue with a remarkable rapidity. While examining the excision of the elbow of a little boy during the autopsy, who had died of pyaemia, Lister noticed that a thick yellow-pus was present at the seat of the humerus bone, and that distended the brachial and axillary veins. He also noticed the pus advanced in the reverse direction along the veins, bypassing the valves in the veins. He also found suppuration in a knee-joint and multiple abscesses in the lungs. Lister knew that Charles-Emmanuel Sédillot had discovered that multiple abscesses in the lungs were caused by introducing pus into the veins of an animal but at the time couldn't explain the facts but believed the pus in the organs had a metastatic origin. On the 2 October 1900, during the Huxley Lecture, Lister described how his interest in the germ theory of disease and how it applied to surgery, began with his investigation into the death of the little boy.


title: Joseph Lister

text: There was an epidemic of gangrene during his surgeoncy. The method to effect a recovery was to chloroform the patient, scrape of the soft slough off and burn the necrotic flesh away with mercury pernitrate Occasionally the treatment would be success but if a grey film appeared at the edge of the wound, then it presaged death. In one patient, the treatment was repeated several times due to it failing, resulting in Erichsen amputating the limb, which healed fine. The evidence that Lister recognised was that disease was a "local poison" and probably parasitic in nature. He examined the diseased tissues under his microscope. He saw peculiar objects that he could not identify, as he had no frame of reference to draw conclusions from the observations. In his notebook he recorded:


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister wrote two papers on the epidemics, both were lost. The first paper was on "Hospital gangrene" and the second was on the use of the "Microscope". They were read to the Student Medical Society at UCL.


title: Joseph Lister

text: On 26 June 2013, medical historian Ruth Richardson and orthopaedic surgeon Bryan Rhodes published a paper, in which they described their discovery of Lister's first operation, that they made while they were both researching his career. At 1pm on 27 June 1851, Lister was a second-year medical student and working at a casualty ward in Gower Street, conducted his first operation. The operation was on Julia Sulivan, a mother of eight grown children. She had been stabbed in the abdomen by her husband, a drunk and ne'er-do-well, who was taken into custody. On 15 September 1851, Lister was called as a witness to his trial at the Old Bailey. His testimony helped convict the husband, who was transported to Australia for 20 years.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister found the woman with a coil of intestine about eight inches across, consisting about a yard of the small intestines, that were damaged in two places, protruding from her lower abdomen. The abdomen itself contained three open wounds. After cleaning the intestines with blood-warm water, Lister was unable to place them back into the body, so he took the decision to extend the cut. They were then placed back in the body, the wounds sewn shut and the abdomen sutured. The patient was administered opium to induce constipation, to enable the intestines to recover. Sulivan recovered her health. It was a full decade before his first public operation in the Glasgow Infirmary.


title: Joseph Lister

text: This operation was missed by historians. Liverpool consultant surgeon John Shepherd, in his essay on Lister, "Joseph Lister and abdominal surgery", written in 1968, failed to mention the operation, instead starting his dates from the 1860s onwards. He apparently was unaware of what Lister accomplished.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister wrote his first paper while he was still at university. It was considered good enough to be published in the "Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science" in 1853.


title: Joseph Lister

text: On 11 August 1852, Lister was presented with piece of a fresh human iris by Wharton Jones, at the University College Hospital. Lister was present at the operation conducted by Jones and took the rare opportunity to study the iris. Lister reviewed the existing research, as well as studying tissue from a horse, a cat, a rabbit and a guinea-pig as well as taking six surgical specimens from patients who underwent a surgical operation on their eye. Lister was unable to complete the research to his satisfaction, due to the need to pass his final examination. He offered an apology in the paper:


title: Joseph Lister

text: The paper advanced the work of Swiss physiologist Albert von Kölliker, demonstrating the existence of two distinct muscles, the dilator and sphincter in the iris, that corrected the convictions of previous researchers that there was no dilator pupillae muscle.


title: Joseph Lister

text: His next paper was an investigation into goose bumps that was published on 1 June 1853, in the same journal. Lister was able to confirm Kölliker's experimental studies, that in humans the smooth muscle fibres are responsible for the making hair standout from the skin, in contrast to other mammals in which large tactile hairs are associated with striated muscle. Lister demonstrated a new method of creating histological sections from the tissue of the scalp.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister's microscopy skills were so advanced that he was able to correct the observations of German histologist, Friedrich Gustav Henle, who mistook small blood vessels for muscle fibres. In each of the papers, he created camera lucida drawings that were so accurate, they could be used to scale and measure the observations.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Both papers attracted significant attention both in Britain and abroad. The naturalist Richard Owen, who was an old friend of Lister's father was particularly impressed by both papers. Owen contemplated recruiting Lister for his own department and forwarded him a thank-you letter on 2 August 1853. Kölliker was particularly pleased at the analysis that Lister had formulated. Kölliker who made many trips to Britain, would eventually meet Lister and became life-long friends. Their close friendship was described in a letter by Kölliker on 17 November 1897, that Rickman Godlee choose to use to illustrate their relationship. Kölliker sent a letter to Lister, when he was president of the Royal Society, congratulating Lister on receiving the Copley medal and fondly remembered his old friends who had died and celebrated his time in Scotland while with Syme and Lister. Kölliker was 80 years old at the time.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister graduated with Bachelor of Medicine with honours, in the autumn 1852. During his final year, Lister won several prestigious awards, that were heavily contested among the student body of the London teaching hospitals. He won the Longridge Prize


title: Joseph Lister

text: that included a £40 stipend. He was also awarded a gold medals in Structural and Physiological Botany. Lister obtained two of the four available gold medals in Anatomy and Physiology as well as surgery, that came with a medal scholarship of £50 a year, for two years, for his second examination in medicine. In the same year, Lister passed the examination for the fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, bringing to a close nine years of education.


title: Joseph Lister

text: With his medical education completed, Sharpey advised Lister to spend a month at the medical practice of his lifelong friend James Syme in Edinburgh and then visit medical schools in Europe for a longer period for training. Sharpey himself had been taught first in Edinburgh and later Paris. Sharpey had met Syme, a teacher of clinical surgery, who was widely considered the best surgeon in the United Kingdom while he was in Paris. Sharpey had gone north to Edinburgh in 1818, along with many other surgeons since, due to the influence of John Hunter. Hunter had taught Edward Jenner who is seen as the first surgeon to take a scientific approach to the study of medicine, that was known as the "Hunterian method" Hunter was an early advocate for careful investigation and experimentation, using the techniques of pathology and physiology to give himself a better understanding of healing than many of his colleagues. For example, his 1794 paper, "A treatise on the blood, inflammation and gun-shot wounds" was the first systematic study of swelling, discovering that inflammation was common to all diseases. Due to Hunter, surgery was raised from a job then practiced by hobbyists or amateurs into a true scientific profession. As the Scottish universities taught medicine and surgery from a scientific viewpoint, surgeons who wished to emulate those techniques travelled north for training. Scottish universities had several other features that distinguished them from the medical universities in the south. They were inexpensive and didn't require religious admissions tests, attracting the most scientifically progressive students in Britain. The most important differentiator, was that medical schools in Scotland had evolved from a scholarly tradition, where English medical schools relied on hospitals and practice. Experimental science had no practitioners at English medical schools and while Edinburgh University medical school was large and active at the time, southern medical schools were generally moribund, their laboratory space and teaching materials being inadequate. English medical schools tended to view surgery as manual labour, not a respectable calling for a gentleman academic.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Before Lister's studies of surgery, many people believed that chemical damage from exposure to "bad air", or "miasma", was responsible for infections in wounds. Hospital wards were occasionally aired out at midday as a precaution against the spread of infection via miasma, but facilities for washing hands or a patient's wounds were not available. A surgeon was not required to wash his hands before seeing a patient; in the absence of any theory of bacterial infection, such practices were not considered necessary. Despite the work of Ignaz Semmelweis and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., hospitals practised surgery under unsanitary conditions. Surgeons of the time referred to the "good old surgical stink" and took pride in the stains on their unwashed operating gowns as a display of their experience.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Syme was a well-established clinical lecturer at Edinburgh University for more than two decades, before he met Lister. Syme was considered the boldest and most original surgeon then living in Great Britain. He became a surgical pioneer during his career, preferring simpler surgical procedures as he detested complexity, in the era that immediately preceded the introduction of anesthesia.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In September 1823, at the age of 24, Syme made a name for himself by first performing an amputation at the hip-joint, the first time in Scotland. Considered the bloodiest operation in surgery, Syme completed it in less than a minute, as speed was essential in a time before anesthesia. Syme became widely known and acclaimed for his development of a surgical operation that became known as "Syme amputation", amputation at the level of the ankle-joint, where the foot is removed and the heel pad is preserved. Syme was considered a scientific surgeon, as evidenced by his paper "On the Power of the Periosteum to form New Bone", and became one of the first advocates of antiseptics.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In September 1853, Lister arrived in Edinburgh bearing letters of introduction from Sharpey to Syme. Lister was anxious about his first appointment but decided to settle in Edinburgh after meeting Syme who embraced him with open arms, invited him to dinner and offered him an opportunity to assist in his private operations.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister was invited to his Syme's house, "Millbank", in Morningside (now part of Astley Ainslie Hospital), where he met, amongst others, Agnes Syme, Syme's daughter by another marriage and granddaughter of the physician Robert Willis. While Lister thought that Agnes was not conventionally pretty, he admired her quickness of mind, her familiarity with medical practice, and her warmth. Lister became a frequent visitor to Millbank and met a much wider group of eminent people than he would have in London.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In the same month, Lister began work as an assistant to Syme at the University of Edinburgh By October 1853, Lister decided to spend the winter in Edinburgh. Syme was so impressed by Lister, that after a month Lister became Syme's supernumerary house surgeon at The Royal Infirmary and his assistant in his private hospital at Minto House in Chambers Street. As house surgeon, he assisted Syme during every operation, taking notes. It was a much coveted position and gave Lister the option of choosing which of the ordinary cases he would attend. During this period, Lister presented a paper at the Royal Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical Society on the structure of cancellous exostoses that had been removed by Syme, demonstrating that the method of ossification of these growths was the same as that which occurs in epiphyseal cartilage.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In September 1854, Lister house surgeoncy appointment was finished. With the prospect of being out of a job, he had spoken to his father about seeking a position at the Royal Free Hospital in London. However, Sharpey had written to Syme, warning him that it was unlikely that Lister would be welcome at the Royal Free as it was he would have likely eclipsed Thomas H. Wakley, whose father held considerable sway at the hospital. Lister then planned to tour Europe for a year. However an opportunity presented itself, when the noted infirmary surgeon and surgical lecturer at the Edinburgh Extramural Richard James Mackenzie had died. Mackenzie had been seen as a successor to Syme but had contracted cholera in Balbec in Scutari, Istanbul, while on a four-month volunteer sabbatical as field surgeon to the 79th Highlanders during the Crimean War. Lister took advantage of the situation and proposed to Syme that he take over Mackenzie's position to become assistant surgeon to Syme. Syme initially rejected the idea as Lister wasn't licensed to operate in Scotland, but later warned to the idea. In October 1854, Lister was appointed a lecturer Lister successfully transferred the lease held by Mackenzie at his lecture room at 4 High School Yards, to himself. On 21 April 1855, Lister was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and two days later, rented a house at 3 Rutland Square for living. In June 1855, Lister made a hurried trip to Paris to take a course on operative surgery on the dead body and returned in June.


title: Joseph Lister

text: On 7 November 1855, Lister gave his first extramural lecture on the "Principles and Practice of Surgery", in a lecture theatre at 4 High School Yards known as "Old Jerusalem" and directly located across from the Infirmary. His first lecture was read from 21 pages of foolscap folio. Lister's first lectures were based on notes, either read or spoken, but over time he used them less and less becoming extempore in his speech, slowly and deliberately forming his argument as he went along. By this deliberate way of speaking, he managed to overcome a slight, occasional stammer which, in his early days, had been more pronounced.


title: Joseph Lister

text: His first student was Batty Tuke, at the time, an anatomy demonstrator for John Goodsir in a class of nine or ten, mostly consisting of dressers. Within a week, twenty-three people had joined. In the next year, only eight folk turned up. In the summer of 1958, Lister had the ignominious experience of reading his lecture to a single student, who arrived ten minutes late. Seven more students arrived later.


title: Joseph Lister

text: His first lecture focused on the concept of surgery, stating a definition of disease that linked it to the Hippocratic Oath. He then explained that surgery could have more benefits than medicines, that could only comfort the patient at best. He then explained the attributes a good surgeon should exhibit, before finishing the lecture by recommending Syme's book "Principles of Surgery". Lister completed 114 lectures that followed a standard syllabus. Lecture VII described his earliest experiment on inflammation when he put mustard on his arm and watched the results. Lecture IV to IX dealt with the circulation of blood. Inflammation was discussed in lectures X to XIII. The second half of the course dealt with clinical surgery. For the last 4 days, he gave 2 lectures a day, in order to complete the event before his marriage, with the first course ending on 18 April 1856. In the summer of 1858, Lister started a second, completely separate course, where he lecturered on surgical pathology and operative surgery.


title: Joseph Lister

text: By mid-summer 1854, Lister realised that he was attracted to Agnes Syme and he started to court her. Lister wrote to his father and mother about his love but both his parents were concerned about the union, particularly concerning the fact he was Quaker and Agnes have no indication that she was going to change her denomination. During that time, when a Quaker married a person of another denomination, it would be considered as marrying "out of the society". Lister was determined to marry Agnes and sent a further letter to his father, asking his father if his financial support would continue should Lister and Agnes become married. Lister's father replied that Agnes not being in the Society of Friends wouldn't affect his pecuniary arrangements. Joseph Jackson offered his son extra money to buy furniture and suggested that Syme would offer a dowry and that he would negotiate with Syme directly on it His father suggested that Lister should voluntarily resign from the Society of Friends. Lister made up his mind and subsequently left the Quakers to become a protestant, later joining the congregation of the Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, in Jeffrey Street, Edinburgh. In August 1855, Lister became engaged to Agnes Syme. On 23 April 1856, Lister married Agnes Syme in the drawing room of Millbank, Syme's house in Morningside. Agnes's sister stated that this was out of consideration of any Quaker relations. Only the Syme family were present. The Scottish physician and essayist John Brown toasted the couple after the reception.


title: Joseph Lister

text: On their honeymoon, the couple spent a month at Upton and the Lake District, followed by three months on a tour of the leading medical institutes in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. The couple returned in October 1856. By this time, Agnes was enamoured of medical research and became Lister's partner in the laboratory for the rest of her life. When they returned to Edinburgh, the couple moved into a rented house at 11 Rutland Street in Edinburgh. The house was situated over three floors with a study on the first floor, that was converting into a consulting room for patients and a room with hot and cold taps on the second floor that became his laboratory. The Scottish surgeon Watson Cheyne, who was almost a surrogate son to Lister, stated after his death that Agnes had entered into her work wholeheartedly, had been his only secretary, and that they discussed his work "on an almost equal footing". Lister's books are full of Agnes' careful handwriting. Agnes would take dictation from Lister, taken at hours at a stretch. Spaces would be left blank amongst the reams of Agnes' handwriting for small diagrams, that Lister would create using the camera lucida technique and Agnes would later paste in.


title: Joseph Lister

text: While he was in Edinburgh, Lister conducted a series of physiological and pathological experiments between the years 1853 and 1859. His approach was rigorous and meticulous in both measurement and description. Lister was clearly aware of the latest advances of physiological research in France, Germany, and other European countries and maintained an on-going discussion of his observations and results with other leading physicians in his peer group including Albert von Kölliker, Wilhelm von Wittich, Theodor Schwann, and Rudolf Virchow and ensured he correctly cited their work.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister's primary instrument of research was his microscope and his primary research material were frogs. Before his honeymoon, the couple had visited his uncle's house in Kinross. Lister had taken his microscope and captured several frogs, intending to use them in the study of inflammation, but they escaped. When he returned from his honeymoon, he used frogs captured from Duddingston Loch in his experiments. Lister carried out his experiments in his laboratory and in the veterinary college abattoir on animals that were either dead or when they were chloroformed. If Lister was using a frog they were "pithed", to deprive them of sensation. He also used bats, sheep, cats, rabbits, oxen and horses in his experiments. Lister was tireless in his pursuit of knowledge and this is illustrated by Thomas Annandale, his assistant who stated:


title: Joseph Lister

text: These experiments resulted in the publication of eleven papers between 1857 and 1859. They included the study of the nervous control of arteries, the earliest stages of inflammation, the early stages of coagulation, the structure of nerve fibres, and the study of the nervous control of the gut with reference to sympathetic nerves. He continued the experiments for three years, until he was appointed to a position at the University of Glasgow.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In a letter dated 16 September 1855, Lister recorded the beginnings of his research into inflammation, six weeks before his lectures were to begin. Inflammation was subject that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. Later in life, Lister stated that he considered his research into the nature of inflammation to be an "essential preliminary" to his conception of the antiseptic principle and insisted these early findings be included in any memorial volume of his work. In 1905, when he was seventy eight years old, he wrote,


title: Joseph Lister

text: Inflammation is defined by four symptoms, heat, redness, swelling and pain. For surgeons prior to Lister, this meant the arrival of suppuration or putrefecation, meaning local or general infection. As the germ theory of disease had not been discovered, infection as a concept didn't exist. However, Lister knew that the phenomena of the slowing of the blood through the capillaries seemed to precede inflammation. Joseph Jackson Lister had written a paper with Thomas Hodgkin that described how blood cells behaved prior to a clot, i.e. specifically how the concave cells fitted themselves together into stacks. Lister knew that to observe the next step, it was important that the tissue remain alive so the blood vessels could be observed through the microscope.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In September 1855, Lister first experiment was on the artery of a frog viewed under his microscope, which was subjected to a water droplet of differing temperatures, to determine the early stage of inflammation. He initially applied a water droplet at 80 °F which caused the artery to contract for a second and the flow ceased, then dilated and the area turned red and the flow of blood increased. He progressively increased the temperature until it was 200 °F. The blood slowed down then coagulated. He continued the experiment on the wing of chloroformed bat to widen his research focus. Lister concluded that the contraction of the vessels lead to the exclusion of blood cells from the capillaries, not their arrest and blood serum continued to flow. This was his first independent discovery.


title: Joseph Lister

text: The experiments ceased between October 1855 and continued in September 1856 when the couple moved into Rutland Square. Lister started with mustard as an irritant, then Croton oil, acetic acid, oil of Cantharidin and chloroform and many others. They led to the production of three papers. His first paper grew out of need to prepare for this extramural lectures and had begun the year before, continuing in development for six weeks, after he moved into Rutland street. The early paper titled: "On the early stages of inflammation as observed in the Foot of a Frog" was read to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh on 5 December 1856. The last third was read out extempore.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Listers research into the process of coagulation was the second major area of investigation that he conducted during this period. He had observed during inflammation in certain cases of septicaemia, that it affected the blood vessels lining leading to intravascular blood clotting, that led to putrefaction and secondary hemorrhage in wounds. Beginning with a simple experiment in December 1856 that was described in a note by Agnes, where he pricked his own finger to observe the process of coagulation, it led to five physiology papers on coagulation between 1858 and the last in 1863.


title: Joseph Lister

text: There were several competing theories that explained the occurrence of a blood clot, and although the theories were largely abandoned, it was still thought that blood contained a liquifying agent, i.e. fibrin held in a solution of ammonia that became known as the "Ammonia theory".


title: Joseph Lister

text: In 1824, Charles Scudamore had proposed carbonic acid as the solution. The prevailing theory was from Benjamin Ward Richardson, who won the 1857 Astley Cooper triennial prize for his essay, where he postulated that blood remained liquid due the presence of ammonia. In the same year, Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke proposed that the vital actions of the vessels inhibited the bloods natural tendency to coagulate.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister's third paper was published in 1858 in the same journal and was read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 1 December 1856. It was research into the histology and function of the minute structures of involuntary muscle fibres. The experiment was conducted in the autumn of 1856, and was designed to confirm Kölliker's observations on the structure of individual muscle fibres. Kölliker description had been criticised as he had used needles to separate the tissue, to observe the individual cells, so his critics stated that he had observed artefacts for the experiment rather than the real muscle cells. Lister proved conclusively that the muscle fibres of blood vessels, described by Lister as slightly flattened elongated elements, were similar to those found by Kölliker in pig intestine, but were wrapped spirally and individually, around the innermost membrane. He stated that the different variations in shape, from long tubular bodies with pointed ends and elongated nuclei to short "spindles" with squat nuclei, were due to different phases of the contraction. During "The Huxley Lecture" he stated he couldn't imagine a more efficient mechanism being used to constrict these vessels.


title: Joseph Lister

text: His next paper, was a short report, based on observations that he made in 1853. This first experiment by Lister, as opposed to purely microscope work, was to prove two goals: firstly to determine the nature of the flow of chyle in the lymphatics and secondly, to determine if the lacteals in the gastrointestinal wall could absorb solid matter, in the form of granules, from the lumen. For the first experiment, a mouse that was fed beforehand on bread and milk was chloroformed then had its abdomen opened and a length of intestine placed on glass under a microscope. Lister repeated the experiment several times and each time saw mesenteric lymph flowing in a steady stream, without visible contractions of the lacteals. For the second experiment Lister dyed some bread with indigo dye and fed it to a mouse, with the result that no indigo particles were ever seen in the chyle. Lister delivered the paper to the 27th meeting of the British Medical Association, that was held in Dublin between 26 August to 2 September 1857. The paper was formally published in 1858 in the "Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science".


title: Joseph Lister

text: In 1858, Lister published seven papers on physiological experiments he conducted on the origin and mechanism of inflammation. Two of these papers were research into the neural control by the nervous system of blood vessels, "An Inquiry Regarding the Parts of the Nervous System Which Regulate the Contractions of the Arteries" and "On the Cutaneous Pigmentary System of the Frog", while the third and the principal paper in the series was titled: "On the Early Stages of Inflammation", which extended the research by Wharton Jones. The three papers were read to the Royal Society of London on 18 June 1857. They had originally been written as one paper and had been sent to Sharpey, John Goodsir and the English pathologist James Paget for review. However, Paget and Goodsir both recommended that is should be published as three separate papers.


title: Joseph Lister

text: The first of these series of experiments was designed to satisfy a contemporary dispute between physiologists, concerning the origin of the influence exercised over blood vessel diameter (calibre) by the sympathetic nervous system. The dispute began when Albrecht von Haller formulated a new theory known as "Sensibility and Irritability" in his 1752 thesis "De partibus corporis humani sensibilibus et irritabilibus". The dispute had been debated since the middle of the 18th century. Haller put forward the view that contractability was a power inherent in the tissues which possessed it, and was fundamental fact of physiology. It concerned the property of "irratability", the supposed automatic response of muscular tissue, especially visceral tissue, to external stimulus, that caused them to contract when stimulated. Even as late as 1853, highly respected textbooks, for example William Benjamin Carpenter "Principles of Human Physiology" stated the doctrine of 'irritability' was a fact beyond dispute. and was still considered contentious when John Hughes Bennett created the "Physiology" article for the 8th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica in 1859.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In his experiments that he started in the autumn of 1856, Lister used a microscope fitted with ocular micrometer to measure the diameter of blood vessels in a frogs web. In a before and after experiment, he ablated parts of the central nervous system and also before and after, with the splitting of the sciatic nerve. Lister concluded that blood vessel tone was controlled by the medulla oblongata and the spinal cord. This refuted Wharton's conclusions, in his paper "Observations on the State of the Blood and the Blood-Vessels in Inflammation." who was not able to confirm that the control of blood vessels of the hind legs was dependent upon spinal centres.


title: Joseph Lister

text: The second part of the original paper that was an experiment into the nature and behaviour of pigment. It had been known for some years that the skin of the frog is capable of varying in colour under different circumstances. The first account of this mechanism and how it is affected had been first described by Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke of Vienna in 1832 and later investigated further by Wilhelm von Wittich in 1854 and Emile Harless in 1947.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister had seen how at the beginning of imflammation was always accompanied by a change of colour in the frogs web. He determined that the pigments consisted of "very minute pigment-granules" that are contained in a network of stellate cells, the branches of which, subdividing minutely and anastomosing freely with one another and with those of neighbouring cells, constitute a delicate network in the substance of the true skin. It had been supposed that the concentration and diffusion of the pigment depended upon the contraction and extension of the branches of the star-shaped cells in which it was contained; and that only these movements of the cells were under the influence of the nervous system. At the time, there was no cell theory of matter nor was they're any dyes or fixatives that could used to enhance experimental discovery. Indeed, Lister wrote of this, stating "The extreme delicacy of the cell wall makes it very difficult to trace it among the surrounding tissue". Lister observed that it was the pigment granules themselves and not the cells that moved, and that this movement is not merely brought about by the control of the nervous system, but that it may be caused by the direct action of irritants on the tissues themselves. He believed that pigment reflected the activity of blood vessels, though it was the slowing of blood flow that initiates the process of inflammation.


title: Joseph Lister

text: The focal study was the longest paper of the three and the last to be published. Like many of his colleagues, Lister was aware that inflammation was the first stage of many postoperative conditions and that excessive inflammation often preceded the onset of a septic condition. Once that happened, the patient would develop a fever. Lister had come to the conclusion that accurate knowledge of the functioning of inflammation could not be obtained by researching the more advanced stages that were subject to secondary processes. He therefore started, in quite a different way from that of almost all his predecessors by directing his enquiry to the very first deviations from health, hoping to find in them "the essential character of the morbid state most unequivocally stamped". Essentially, Lister performed these experiments to discover the causes of erythrocyte adhesiveness. As well as experimenting on frogs web and bats wing, Lister used blood that he had obtained from the end of his own finger that was inflamed and compared it against blood from one of his other fingers. He discovered that after something irritating had been applied to living tissues which did not kill them outright firstly the blood-vessels contracted and their lumen became very small; the part became pale. Secondly, the vessels after an interval, dilated and the part became red. Thirdly, some of the blood in the most injured blood-vessels slowed down in its flow and coagulated. Redness occurred which, being solid, could not be pressed away. Lastly, the fluid of the blood passed through the vessel walls and formed a " blister " about the seat of injury. He found that each tiny artery was surrounded by a muscle, which enables it to contract and dilate. He found further that this contraction and dilation was not an individual act on its part, but was an act dictated to it by the nervous cells in the spinal cord.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister's paper was able to show that capillary action is governed by the constriction and dilation of the arteries. The action is affected by trauma, irritation or reflex action through the central nervous system. He noticed that although the capillary walls lack muscle fibres, they are very elastic and are subject to


title: Joseph Lister

text: significant capacity variations that are influenced by arterial blood flow into the circulatory system. Drawings made with a camera lucida were used to depict the experimental reactions. They displayed vascular stasis and congestion in the early stages of the body's reaction to damage.


title: Joseph Lister

text: According to Lister, vascular alterations that were initially brought on by reflexes occurring within the nervous system were followed by changes that were brought on by local tissue damage. In the conclusions to the paper, Lister linked his experimental observations to physical clinical conditions, for example skin damage resulting from boiling water and trauma occurring after a surgical incision.


title: Joseph Lister

text: After the paper was read to the Royal Society in June 1857, it was very well received and his name became known outside Edinburgh.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Listers first paper is an account of a case of spontaneous gangrene in a child. The paper on coagulation was read before the Medico-Chirugical Society of Edinburgh on the 18 March 1858. In a account written by Agnes, she states that there was no one at the medical school meeting who was capable of appreciating it, and the remarks made upon it were very poor. There was suggestions for improvement which Lister threw out. There was lots of cheering, proclaiming it a great success. The paper was written-up at 7pm, with Lister dictating and Agnes writing it during a 50-minute session, followed by the exposition to the society at George Street hall at 8pm.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister first used the amputated legs from sheep and discovered that blood remained liquid in the blood vessels for up to six days and still underwent coagulation, albeit more slowly when the vessel was opened. He also noticed that if vessels remained fresh, the blood would remain fluid. In later experiments he moved to cats. He tried to emulate an inflamed blood vessel by exposing the jugular vein of the animal and applying irritants then constricting and opening the flow, to measure the effect. He noticed that in the damaged vessel the blood would coagulate He eventually came to the conclusion that if there was an Ammonia in the blood, it was much less important than the condition of the vessel in stopping coagulation. He tested his hypthosis on three cadavers by examining the condition of various veins and arteries and found he was correct. He also concluded that Ammonia thoery didn't apply to vessels in the body, but it could apply to blood outside the body. While that was incorrect, his others conclusions were accurate. Certainly, Lister had no knowledge of the coagulation cascade but his experiments contributed to the current understanding of clotting.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister continued experimenting in April, examining vessels and blood from a horse. This resulted in another communication to the society on the 7 April. His work in coagulation continued until the end of year. Listers second paper on coagulation was published in August 1958 and titled: "Case of Ligature of the Brachial Artery, Illustrating the Persistent Vitality of the Tissues". It was a short two page paper where he describes saving a patients arm from being amputated which had been constricted by a tourniquet for thirty hours, using the knowledge of coagulation that he had discovered in the previous months.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister continual interest in the nervous control of blood vessels led him to conduct a series of experiments during June and July 1858, where he researched the nervous control of the gut. The research was published in the form of three letters sent to Sharpey. The first letters two sent on 28 June and 7 July 1858 The last letter was published as the "Preliminary Account of an Inquiry into the Functions of the Visceral Nerves, with special reference to the so-called Inhibitory System.".


title: Joseph Lister

text: He had been studying the work of Claude Bernard, LJ Budge and Augustus Waller and had become interested in what was known as "sympathetic action", where the inflammation appeared in a different area from the source of irritation. This led him to study Pflüger's 1857 paper titled "About the inhibitory nervous system for the peristaltic movements of the intestines", where Pflüger proposed that the splanchnic nerves instead of exciting the intestine muscle layer that they are connected to, inhibit their movement. The German physiologist Eduard Weber made the same claim. Pflüger had named these inhibitory nerves "Hemmungs-Nervensystem". Lister had approached Syme who suggested a translation as "inhibitory nervous system". Lister dismissed the idea of inhibitory nerves believing that nerves were responsible for both increased and decreased muscle activity depending on the incoming stimulus.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister had been previously experimenting with galvanic stimulation of the vagus nerve in rabbits and due to their active gut movement, he considered them ideal for the experiment. To ensure their gut reflexes weren't impaired, the rabbits weren't anaesthetised. Lister conducted three experiments. In the first experiment, an incision was made in the rabbit's side and a section of intestine was pulled through the skin. Lister then connected a magnetic coil battery to the splanchnic nerves in the spinal cord. When the current was applied, the gut completely relaxed but when the current was applied locally, a small localised contraction occurred that didn't spread to the bowel. Lister stated that "this observation is of fundamental importance, since it proves that the inhibitory influence does not operate directly upon the muscular tissue, but upon the nervous apparatus by which its contractions are, under ordinary circumstances, elicited". In the second experiment, Lister examined the reaction in a section of the bowel, when he restricted the blood supply by tying the vessels and found that there was increase in peristalsis. When he applied current the gut relaxed. He concluded that activity in the gut was under the control of bowel wall nerves and had been stimulated due to loss of blood. In the third experiment he removed the nerves from a section of bowel while ensuring to maintain a good blood supply. This time, stimulation of the section had no effect except when the section would spontaneously contract. The experiment enabled Lister to conclude: "


title: Joseph Lister

text: Listers third paper on coagulation was a short article in the form of a communication consisting of five pages that was read before the Medico-Chirugical Society of Edinburgh on 16 November 1859.


title: Joseph Lister

text: On 1 August 1859, Lister wrote to his father to inform him of the ill-health of James A. Lawrie, Regius Professor of Surgery at the University of Glasgow, believing he was close to death. The anatomist Allen Thomson had written to Syme to inform him of Lawrie's condition and that it was his opinion that Lister was the most suitable person for the position. Lister stated that Syme believed he should become a candidate for the position. He went on to discuss the merits of the post; a higher salary, being able to undertake more surgery and being able to create a bigger private practice. Lawrie died on 23 November 1859. In the following month, Lister received a private communication, although baseless, that confirmed he had received the appointment. However, it was clear the matter was not settled when a letter appeared in the Glasgow Herald on 18 January 1860 that discussed a rumour that the decision had been handed over to the Lord Advocate and officials in Edinburgh. It also drew attention to a circular that had been delivered to physicians at the university. It been written by Walter Buchanan (MP) and Robert Dalglish (MP) asking who was best qualified. The letter annoyed the members of the governing body of Glasgow University, the Senatus Academicus. The matter was taken up by the Vice-Chancellor Thomas Barclay in a meeting with the home secretary George Cornewall Lewis and the Rector James Bruce that tipped the decision in favour of Lister. On the 28 January 1860, Lister's appointment was confirmed.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In 1860, university life in Glasgow was lived in the grimy quadrangles of the small college on Glasgow High Street, that was itself surrounded by the most squalid part of the old medieval city. The Scottish poet and novellist Andrew Lang wrote of his student days at the college, that while Coleridge could smell 75 different stenches during his student days in Cologne, Lang counted more. The city was so polluted the grass didn't grow. The college classrooms were considered too small and had low ceilings for the number of students, which made them unpleasant to be in when filled to overcrowding.


title: Joseph Lister

text: When Lister began his career in Glasgow, he inherited a large class of students that grew rapidly. Before his first lecture, he cleaned and painted the dingy lecture room assigned to him, at his own expense.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In 1 January 1863, Lister returned to the topic of coagulation when he presented the Croonian Lecture with the title "On the coagulation of the blood". The prestigious lecture was given at the invitation of the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians and was held before the society in London. This was Lister's most important paper on coagulation as it provides a mature and considered view upon the matter, from a professor with a world-wide reputation.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In the spring of 1865, while walking home with Thomas Anderson, the chemistry professor at Glasgow, Anderson introduced Lister to the work of the French chemist Louis Pasteur. At that time, Lister was not a wide reader of continental literature nor of chemical literature. Anderson drew Lister's attention to the latest research by Pasteur. These were two papers, the first was "Sur les corpuscules organisés qui existent dans l'atmosphère, examen de la doctrine des générations spontanées" 1861 (On the organized particles that exist in the atmosphere, examination of the doctrine of spontaneous generations) In this paper, Pasteur destroyed the theory of spontaneous generation. He tested the hypothesis that life in boiled infusions arose from spores. He also proved that particles in the air could be cultivated; and if they were introduced from the air, into a sterile liquid, they would reappear and multiply in the liquid. The second paper that Lister read that day was Pasteur's magnus opus, called the "Examen du rôle attribué au gaz oxygène atmosphérique dans la destruction des matières animales et végétales après la mort" 1863 (Examination of the role attributed to atmospheric oxygen gas in the destruction of animal and plant matter after death). The paper showed that fermination, putrefaction and slow combustion destroyed organic matter and these were necessary processes for life to exist. Pasteur learned that slow combustion was related to the anaerobic conditions that were present, if microorganisms were present.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Five of the papers that Pasteur published between 1857 and 1863 would directly influence Lister's work on microorganisms.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister read about Louis Pasteur's discovery of living things causing fermentation and putrefaction in the journal "Comptes rendus hebdomadaires" of the French Academy of Sciences.


title: Joseph Lister

text: The first paper that piqued Lister's interest was the "Mémoire sur la fermentation appelée lactique (Extrait par l'auteur)" (Memoir on the so-called lactic acid fermentation (Extracted by the author)) published in 1857.


title: Joseph Lister

text: The second paper was the "Memoire sur la Fermentation Alcoolique" (Memoir on Alcoholic Fermentation) that was published in Annales de chimie et de physique in 1860. Pasteur described the living beings, microorganisms in yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae that were responsible for effervescent change that leads to fermentation.


title: Joseph Lister

text: The third paper by Pasteur was the "Animalcules infusoires vivant sans gaz oxygène libre et déterminant des fermentations", (Animal Infusoria Living in the Absence of Free Oxygen and their fermentations) The paper, that was presented in 1861, was seminal in enabling Lister to understand Sepsis, where the bodies response to infections leads to injury in the tissue and organs. Pasteur's research led him to believe the ferment that produced Butyric acid was a microbe that lived in the absence of oxygen.


title: Joseph Lister

text: The discovery was serendipitous, as he read them during the time that he was struggling to control post-surgical infections. Lister was one of the few surgeons who was able to accept Pasteurs conclusions without question. He accepted them as a simple explanation for a problem for which he had long experience. He was now convinced that infection and suppuration of wounds must be due to entry into the wound of minute living airborne creatures. He recognised that contamination was the vector for infection, realising from the first that the surgeons hands, dressings and instruments would also be contaminated. However, Pasteur's work could only confirm the view, which Lister had always expressed that contamination came from the air. Lister didn't realise that it was not the air but the vast number of different microbic life that was responsible. As Lister's work at that time was derived directly from Pasteur's work, Lister probably thought that infection of the wound was due to a single organism. He had no conception, nor indeed did anybody else of the vast number of types of germs that existed. The realisation that occurred after reading the papers, spurred him to determine how the hands, dressings and instruments he used could be rid of these ubiquitous organisms and how the wound could be cleared of them.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Pasteur suggested three methods to eliminate the micro-organisms: filtration, exposure to heat, or exposure to solution/chemical solutions. As the first two methods suggested by Pasteur were unsuitable for the treatment of human tissue, Lister experimented with the third idea. Lister was particularly interested in the efficacy of filtration and repeated many of Pasteur experiments for instruction in his class.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Lister confirmed Pasteur's conclusions with his own experiments and decided to use his findings to develop antiseptic techniques for wounds.


title: Joseph Lister

text: In 1834, Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge discovered phenol, also known as carbolic acid, which he derived in an impure form from coal tar. At that time, there was uncertainty between the substance of creosote – a chemical that had been used to treat wood used for railway ties and ships since it protected the wood from rotting – and carbolic acid. Upon hearing that creosote had been used for treating sewage, Lister began to test the efficacy of carbolic acid when applied directly to wounds.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Therefore, Lister tested the results of spraying instruments, the surgical incisions, and dressings with a solution of carbolic acid. Lister found that the solution swabbed on wounds remarkably reduced the incidence of gangrene.


title: Joseph Lister

text: The history of antiseptic surgery in the years before 1847, was preventing or treating infection in accidental wounds, often received in battle.


title: Joseph Lister

text: For three days in November 1859, Lister examined Pus corpuscle from the eye of rabbit as well as blood taken from the heart and arteries.


title: Joseph Lister

text: On 12 August 1865, Lister achieved success for the first time when he used full-strength carbolic acid to disinfect a compound fracture. He applied a piece of lint dipped in carbolic acid solution onto the wound of an 11-year-old boy, James Greenlees, who had sustained a compound fracture after a cart wheel had passed over his leg. After four days, he renewed the pad and discovered that no infection had developed, and after a total of six weeks he was amazed to discover that the boy's bones had fused back together, without suppuration. He subsequently published his results in "The Lancet" in a series of six articles, running from March through July 1867.


title: Joseph Lister

text: Before the publication of these articles, the French doctor Jules Lemaire, in a book from 1863 reprinted in 1865, had already pointed out the antiseptic power of carbolic acid. On 21 September 1867, in the Edinburgh "Daily Review", James Young Simpson (using a pseudonym) expressed the idea that Lister's last article was misleading, as it "attribute[d] the first surgical employment of carbolic acid to Professor Lister". Simpson then mentioned Lemaire's work.