In the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, a surgeon called Dr Robert Liston was working at a London hospital. He had a considerable reputation. In one of his many infamous cases, he was amputating a patient's leg when his flaying knife accidentally removed his assistant's fingers. The patient died from an infection, as did the luckless assistant, while someone watching the operation died from shock after Liston's knife slashed through the poor man's coat tails. It remains the only operation in surgical history with a 300 percent mortality rate.
The problem with this story is that it probably isn't true. The only evidence it happened comes from a book called Great Medical Disasters written more than a century later, in 1983, by the doctor and author Richard Gordon (1921 - 2017). There are no primary sources to confirm Liston's apocryphal operation ever took place. Indeed, Gordon was more a fan of fiction than fact. He is most famous for his Doctor in the House series of novels that satirised the medical world of the 1950s and 1960s.
Despite this lack of evidence, the tale of Liston's 300 percent mortality rate is everywhere: in medical journals, in history books and in every biography of the man ever written. But this story doesn't just shape the reputation of Liston himself. The invention contributes to the general idea that Victorian medicine, and particularly surgery, was cruel, dramatic and bloody, and that 19th century doctors were emotionally detached, even barbaric. But the real story is a lot more complicated, and much more interesting.
VICTORIAN DISEASES
Victorian doctors dealt with many of the same diseases we do today. Patients lived and died with chronic conditions like cancer, heart disease and kidney failure. In 1856, a woman living in London called Emily Bowes Gosse felt a lump in her breast. She consulted her doctor, who immediately diagnosed her with cancer and recommended she get her affairs in order and prepare for death. She sought a second opinion, desperate for better news.
