Dr. Robert Liston’s Legacy
Despite all of his achievements, Dr. Robert Liston has a legacy that is not entirely favorable. In addition to being perceived as argumentative and abrasive, he also had a reputation for reveling in the limelight of the operational theatre. In fact, he was so showy with his surgical techniques that one time, he cut off a patient’s testicles while performing an amputation. In another surgery, a young boy presented with a pulsating abscess in his neck. Liston insisted that it was a tumor and brandished his knife on the boy, who quickly died of blood loss.
In another case, he performed surgery on a man who had a 45-pound tumor in his scrotum. The poor man had to carry it around in a wheelbarrow to get around. The procedure took only four minutes. In what is possibly his most famous case, he amputated a leg in two and a half minutes, but in his bravado, also severed the fingers off of his assistant, who died as a result of gangrene in the lacerated area. A spectator to the surgery thought that he had been stabbed with the surgeon’s knife and died of fright. The patient survived the surgery but died of gangrene. This was perhaps the only operation in history that had a 300% mortality rate.
Still, Liston had one of the best mortality rates in surgery. Only one in ten of his patients died, compared to an average of one out of three. One might say that he set a standard for surgical mortality in which such a high mortality rate – over 30% of patients – could no longer be considered acceptable. He went on to perform the first procedure in Europe that used general anesthesia, something that drastically changed the face of surgery and increased the person’s likelihood of surviving. No longer did an assistant have to hold someone down while the doctor hacked off an infected limb.
Additionally, Liston published several books and pioneered medical innovations. His 1837 book Practical Surgeries spoke of the need to perform surgeries quickly and efficiently to decrease the pain of the patient and increase the chance of survival. In 1835, he became a professor of clinical surgery at London’s University College Hospital, where he passed on his techniques to many aspiring surgeons. He invented a type of leg splint that is still used today to help stabilize dislocations of the femur, as well as Bulldogs forceps and isinglass sticking plaster.
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