The Wash-and-Be-Clean Man

In 1860s Britain, surgeons wore frock coats stiffened with old blood. They wore them proudly. A coat dark and crackling with the leavings of previous patients was a badge: a man who operated, and operated often. They spoke fondly of "the good old surgical stink" the way other men spoke of a good cigar.

Into this room walked Joseph Lister, a soft-spoken Quaker with a stammer, and asked them to wash their hands.

He had read Pasteur. He sprayed carbolic acid over wounds and instruments and the air itself. On his Glasgow wards, mortality fell from 46% to 15%. Patients who should have died walked out in six weeks. He published in The Lancet.

His colleagues responded by slamming doors. They would enter the operating theatre, swing the door shut behind them with a flourish, and announce to the room: There. Mr Lister's germs can't get in now. Then they would pick up their instruments with unwashed hands and begin.

This went on for roughly twenty years. Men in blood-stiff coats, slamming doors at an invisible enemy they refused to believe in, while down the road in Glasgow the boy with the crushed leg got up and walked home.

In 1902 King Edward VII, saved from appendicitis by Lister's methods, told him: if it had not been for you, I wouldn't be sitting here today.

The coats, by then, had finally gone to the wash.