March 16, 1867

Joseph Lister

The Lancet publishes Lister's first antiseptic-treatment installment

Lister did not open with a manifesto. He opened with four case histories and a practical problem: how to stop an open fracture from putrefying.

Four pages, 16 March 1867

The Lancet issue of 16 March 1867 carried pages 326–329 of Joseph Lister's “On a New Method of Treating Compound Fracture, Abscess, etc., with Observations on the Conditions of Suppuration.” It was the first published account of his carbolic-acid treatment.

The four pages presented four compound-fracture case histories rather than a general survey of surgery. Lister's clinical problem was to prevent putrefaction and suppuration so that an open injury would heal more like a closed fracture.

The boy with the crushed leg

The cases opened with James Greenlees, an eleven-year-old admitted to Glasgow Royal Infirmary on 12 August 1865 after a cart caused an open fracture of his lower leg.

By the time he published in March 1867, Lister had spent roughly two years treating dangerous compound fractures with carbolic-acid preparations, and he drew on Louis Pasteur's work on airborne organisms and putrefaction to explain what he was doing.

Readers had to wait a week for more

The 16 March pages were the opening installment, not the whole report. It continued in The Lancet on 23 March, 30 March, 27 April and 27 July — five installments in all.

This was also not the later paper “On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery,” which followed an August address. The carbolic spray was a later development, and acceptance of the method was neither immediate nor universal.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →