The Doctor Who Went To War
Life is getting better in the U.S. now. Things feel more normal and optimistic with vaccinations proliferating and coronavirus infection rates plummeting. However, it is hard to forget what unfolded before this resurgence of hope.
Turning on our televisions in the past year and switching on our phones meant being unable to escape the maelstrom of coronavirus news. You likely saw preventive measures: wear a mask, wash your hands with soap and water for 20 seconds, stay 6-ft apart.
Maybe you also saw the amount of COVID-19 cases in your state on internet maps. Maybe you heard news anchors reporting the total number of cases and deaths in the United States daily. The equivalent of being hit by bricks constantly.
Perhaps you experienced the pain of knowing a loved one contracted COVID-19 or worse — they passed away. Perhaps you suffered COVID-19’s cruelty and survived.
2020 was a bleak year. There is no doubt about it. This virus has ruined fun events people have held dear as time-honored traditions. Graduations, proms, office socializing, weddings, vacations around the world in 80 days — or however many days you planned to vacation… people were deprived of these joys.
Wearing a mask and staying away from gatherings wasn’t fun, but it was necessary.
Pandemics and disease are not newly introduced burdens to humanity. They have been with us since the beginning of time. Science has improved; it has developed sophisticated methods to prevent and treat communicable diseases (and non-communicable ones) over centuries. The 2nd millennium had abundant progress from Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine to Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin.
Introduction to a Baron & Doctor
One key agent of progress I would like to relate to our contemporary crisis is known for revolutionizing surgery. Making getting an operation safe and life-saving. 200+ years ago, getting stitches or having a problematic issue removed from you could lead to higher mortality.
Who is this agent of progress? He has a household product named after him: Listerine mouthwash. He is honored as “The Father of Modern Surgery.” He was declared a baron by a queen! Queen Victoria.
You guessed it. Baron Joseph Lister.
“Lister-who? Why all of the fuss about him?” you may ask. “Isn’t he an old guy from ancient times nobody knows about?”
No. Not that ancient. But yes, he lived most of his life in the 1800s.
One can google him. They will see a solemn, earnest man wearing either dark or gray sideburns depending on the date of the photo at different stages of his life.
Lister did something astonishing. He declared a massive, destructive war. But not what you believe. So breathe a sigh of relief.
He declared war on harmful germs!
The best medical experts of the time rebuked germ theory as coming from charlatans and a scientific hoax. The true hoax, the miasma theory, was taken as fact. If a patient died after an operation, doctors said that patients’ wounds absorbed “bad air,” putrid-smelling air. That, the conventional physicians asserted, caused infections and deaths. Nothing else could have been behind it.
Nothing else, until…
A young man arrived at the center of the chaos. Born in 1827, Lister had been from a Quaker household. A household of affluence tempered by Quaker humility, sublime parenting from a loving father and mother, and faith in God.
Lister was known for his humility, empathy, and quiet strength. Present were these characteristics so much that Lister never called his patients “cases.” He saw them as human beings. Saw their needs. Saw their pain. He did not mind sewing up a little girl’s doll for her or doing what he could to ease his patients’ discomfort. Reading about this act of Lister’s was touching to the soul.
His father left a significant impact on him. His father was adept in the sciences. Joseph Jackson Lister taught his young son how to use a microscope properly when most in the medical community saw it as a gratuitous elegance with no practical purpose.
Lister’s Lengthy Fight
Caution and care mattered less than speed and bravado in medicine. With this type of value system, it is remarkable that Lister found it exceedingly troubling to his soul that 45% to 50% of his patients died of infections after an operation. Other physicians would not have cared that much. He read several scientific pieces of literature to see what could help him. Then he encountered his French counterpart, chemist/microbiologist Louis Pasteur’s written report in 1864. What he would read would help with his war on harmful pathogens. He was not alone in this war.
Ignaz Semmelweis of Hungary had once saved mothers who gave birth from puerperal or “childbed” fever. How? By insisting the doctors who touched cadavers washed their hands in a chlorinated lime solution before delivering children years before Lister did.
Semmelweis was mocked, ridiculed, and even viewed as crazy for suggesting doctors may have killed their patients. The tragic irony is he died of an infection in a mental asylum after guards allegedly beat him for attempting to flee the asylum. After his ostracization from the medical community caused a nervous breakdown.
Years after Semmelweis made the connection, Lister was reading lab results that Pasteur penned. The gist of the findings is Pasteur discovered that microbes could remain on the human body in addition to objects. However, Pasteur added, vanquishing them was possible.
Lister thought about how to defeat perilous pathogenic pains. Starting in 1865, he formulated a chemical substance known as carbolic acid and created what he dubbed the “donkey engine.” The carbolic spray. It released antibacterial mist into the air to kill airborne menaces, sterilized surgical instruments. Furthermore, it was administered on dressings for wounds, thus keeping injuries sterilized so that sepsis/gangrene would not develop.
Lister used this to help an 11-year-old boy named James Greenlees whose leg injury came at the hand of a metal-wheeled cart shattering the bones in his leg.
Imagine being in his shoes and feeling afraid, knowing that hospitals were unclean and could induce a faster demise than staying out of it and suffering at home.
Greenlees did not meet such a cruel fate like countless other people before. He met Dr. Lister in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Lister used carbolic acid on a dressing for his wound upon having the wound itself cleaned. Fortunately, it proved effective. Germany & France’s physicians had been the ones who were most open-minded about Lister’s ideas.
Ward death rates on Lister’s watch fell once handwashing/routine disinfection arrived. Resistance remained, however. Lister was undaunted and continued to teach, write, and experiment because of his genuine love and concern for mankind’s wellbeing.
Top medical experts of Lister’s day were opposed to any language blaming doctors as detrimental to their patients’ health. Lister faced the bitter winds of narrow-mindedness and egotism partly because not many people saw any truth in microbiologists’ revelations. Lister eventually witnessed his hard-fought battle for cleanliness in hospitals and the precautions we are accustomed to today when visiting doctors be accepted more broadly.
Current Courage in Crisis
Let us come back to the present now. History, the discipline of looking backward, can be boring. And that understandable. It is okay.
Who else has been reported in the news to be facing bitter winds of narrow-mindedness? One person I think of (though he is not the only person) is Dr. Anthony Fauci. Did you hear about the death threats Fauci received in the nadir of the outbreak crisis?
Threats from science skeptics forced Fauci to hire bodyguards. Bodyguards! A scientist whose life has been dedicated to the service of humanity and finding treatments for diseases. A scientist who came to the forefront of national public health in the 1980s partly because he was researching HIV/AIDS in that epidemic.
The White House he worked under last year viewed him as an annoyance because he contradicted lies about the virus and its gravity. He plainly said that coronavirus was badly serious. He acknowledged that it was real.
Not long after, he stopped coming to briefings (presumably on senior-level Trump officials’ orders). On top of that, the former president eventually prevented him from speaking to the public during televised updates.
Hydroxychloroquine, a drug that numerous trial studies rebuffed, showing it as ineffective. Injection of disinfectant into the human body so that it can cure COVID-19 once “it gets on the lungs,” as one infamous figure thoughtlessly mused aloud.
History Repeating Itself?
One can see parallels.
False theories about miasma and illness contracted by noxious vapors in the air were pervasive pre-20th century. In the 21st century, people in positions of authority handled a global pandemic in the U.S. with falsehoods about phony treatments for COVID.
Physicians once refused to wash their hands, wear uncontaminated clothing, wash blood-stained clothes, and clean tools that pierce and incise a human being’s skin and organs 200 hundred years ago. 500 years ago. Today, the partisan division pushed some Americans to refuse to wear masks and keep 6-feet of physical distance. Some experts such as Scott Atlas put out flagrantly dishonest public health information — and did not have qualifications in the field of infectious disease.
A part of America decried Fauci as an instrument of the “deep state.” The former president called him a Democrat. Fauci is in an apolitical job whether he has any personal inclination towards a political party or not. He takes being a public health advisor seriously.
He was found guilty of not obfuscating or sugarcoating bitter facts that hurt selfish political ambitions. They said the government wanted to seize power using a ploy (using Fauci) to trick Americans into giving up their freedoms with lockdowns and restrictions.
Western medical practitioners attacked Lister as a liar. They said he insulted eminent health experts. That he promoted quack ideas so he could accuse the very people who performed operations so patients can live of having a hand (no pun intended) in their patients’ proliferated mortality.
Lister knew that he could not withhold his knowledge or capitulate due to pressure and scorn.
Fauci knew he could not withhold coronavirus information even at the peril of losing his job, even when his life itself was imperiled.
Takeaway Thoughts
You do not have to agree that Fauci did a service to this nation during our worst pandemic moments or any point in his career. You may not like him, and that is perfectly fine. Not everybody has to like someone.
But we can all (hopefully) agree that…
Compassion has proved even more important in this past dreadful year.
If you want a person who specializes in helping people live to comfort you and assure you in the kindest, most sincere, least pretentious way, would you want a doctor like Dr. Lister today?
Works Cited:
Cartwright, Frederick F.. “Joseph Lister”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Apr. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Lister-Baron-Lister-of-Lyme-Regis. Accessed 7 May 2021.
Naylor, Daisy. “Tragic life of Ignaz Semmelweis — thrown into an asylum after saving lives”. Mirror, 20 Mar. 2020, https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/tragic-life-ignaz-semmelweis-thrown-21724212. Accessed 7 May 2021.
Simpson, Leah. “PICTURED: Dr. Fauci, 79, and his wife flanked by bodyguards while out walking after he receives death threats”. Daily Mail, 19 Oct. 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8855647/Dr-Fauci-forced-federal-agents-power-walks-hes-receiving-death-threats.html. Accessed 8 May 2021.
