concerned with every new thing, he was a daring and original operator and an inspiring teacher. He excised the larynx in 1873 and the stomach in 1881. Dozens of American surgeons, now active, studied under him, and his name is a household word among us.

We have seen that the two great surgical events of the last century were the discovery of anæsthesia and the development of antisepsis. In a measure the two go together. Either would be less effective lacking the other. Lister was a student in University College, London, when ether anesthesia was demonstrated in Boston; and though he had not yet begun his medical studies, the fame of the discovery, if not the enthusiasm for it of Liston, who, first of English surgeons, used ether in the North London Hospital, must have stirred Lister's youthful mind.

JOSEPH LISTER was born on April 5, 1827, at Upton, in Essex County, England. He is not a Scotchman, as many think, though his notable work was done in Scotch universities. His biography has not yet been published, so that material for a sketch of Lister's career is scanty and scattered. Six years ago (1902) there was the Lister Jubilee, to commemorate his fifty years of professional life. English medical journals celebrated the event in articles furnished by some of his old friends and pupils. From such sources and from the writings of the man himself one may construct a broken story. As the British Medical Journal says, its contributors "have related the biography of a scientific thesis rather than of the man who established it."

Lister's father was Joseph Jackson Lister and his mother was Isabella, daughter of Anthony Harris, of Maryport, Cumberland. The elder Listers were Quakers. The mother died in 1864 and the father in 1869. Joseph Jackson Lister, following his own father's trade, was a wine merchant in London, but in spite of the claims of business, he was through life an earnest student of science. He made important improvements in the microscope, and in the year that saw the birth of his distinguished son he published, with Thomas Hodgkin, a paper entitled "Some Microscopical Observations of the Blood and Animal Tissues." His son wrote a life of him for the "Dictionary of National Biography," from which it appears that the senior Lister was a useful and constant contributor to the construction of the microscope and to microscopic studies. In 1834 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Joseph Lister was carefully educated for his profession. He went to a private school, as a lad, and then to University College, whence he was graduated B.A. in 1847. In that same year, at the age of twenty, he began the study of medicine, which he followed zealously for five years in the medical faculty of University College and at University College Hospital. During this course he was greatly influenced by Graham, professor of chemistry, and Sharpey, professor of physiology strong and inspiring men. His father's influence with him was important, too, in those years, so that we hear of the young man's devoting himself early to histologic research. His first published paper,

written in 1852, deals with the existence in the iris of tissue identical with ordinary unstriped muscle, and with its distribution. In 1853 he produced "Observations on the Muscular Tissue of the Skin." Meantime, in 1852, he had been graduated M.B., and had become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. In the hospital Lister served as dresser and house surgeon to J. E. Erichsen; his own house surgeon and senior while he was in the former office being Henry Thompson. Of those early years we know little as yet, though we must believe they were fruitful years; for what years of Lister's busy life have failed of accomplishment?

On leaving the hospital he followed the advice of Sharpey and Thompson, and went to Edinburgh. Sharpey told him to take six weeks of Syme's clinic. Now, Syme had gone up to London to be a surgeon to the University College Hospital, in 1848, for a few months after Liston's death. So Lister went to Scotland for six weeks, and in Scotland he worked and taught for twenty-three years. He went to Scotland an obscure student; he returned to England one of the lights of the surgical world.

One may divide geographically the progress of Lister's career: A youthful period in Edinburgh, from 1854 to 1860; professor of surgery in Glasgow, from 1860 to 1869; professor of clinical surgery in Edinburgh, from 1869 to 1877; professor of clinical surgery in King's College, London, from 1877 to 1893, when, at the age of sixty-six, he retired from active teaching and was made emeritus professor of clinical surgery and consulting surgeon to the hospital.