Time Me, Gentlemen

Robert Liston operated in a bottle-green coat and Wellington boots, six feet two of Scottish surgeon, and before each amputation he called up to the students in the gallery, "Time me, gentlemen, time me!" They held pocket watches over the rails. This was 1840s London. There was no anaesthetic. Speed was mercy, and Liston was the fastest knife in the West End, through a thigh in two and a half minutes, the bloodied blade clamped between his teeth so both hands were free to work the saw.

The speed had a cost. A boy came in with a lump on his neck. "Whoever heard of an aneurysm in one so young?" Liston said, and lanced it, and the carotid hit the ceiling. Once, mid-amputation, he also took off the patient's testicles. What the gallery made of this is not recorded.

And then there is the operation people still tell each other about, the one where, the story goes, the patient died of gangrene, the assistant's fingers went with the leg and he died of gangrene too, and a spectator saw his coat-tails slashed open and died on the spot of fright. Three hundred percent mortality. One stroke of the knife.

He was, by every measure his contemporaries had, the safest surgeon in London.