August 12: Where healing walks the edge of death

On August 12, 1865, Joseph Lister performed the first antiseptic surgery. Tonight's film: Flatliners (1990).

There is a date in the almanac that always stops me. August 12. Three things happened on this day, and all three are about lines crossed. The main one, tonight’s headline, is the line between healing and death.

On August 12, 1865, at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, a British surgeon named Joseph Lister treated the compound fracture of an eleven-year-old boy, James Greenlees. A cart wheel had crushed the boy’s leg, and the bone had come through the skin. In those days that was close to a death sentence. Between 45 and 50 percent of amputation cases in hospitals ended in sepsis. Surgeons wore their blood-stained coats as a badge of pride, instruments were barely washed, and the whole thing was blamed on “bad air”, on miasma. Lister had read Louis Pasteur’s work on microorganisms, and he thought differently. He took a carbolic acid solution, washed the wound with it, soaked the dressing in it. The boy survived, and healed without infection. By 1869 the mortality rate on Lister’s ward had dropped to 15 percent.

That is the moment surgery stops being a gamble and becomes a science. And that line is exactly where tonight’s film lives.