Article ID: CBB250007062

No Time for Statistics: Joseph Lister's Antisepsis and Types of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century British Surgery (2020)

unapi

This article documents Joseph Lister's reluctance to publish numerical material and aims at explaining his skeptical view about statistics through an investigation of his approach in its historical context. In this context, statistics was only one kind of evidence used in surgery, along with case histories and experimental results from the laboratory. They represent different "ways of knowing," anchored in different social, conceptual, and practical contexts. The account looks at Lister's approach to wound disease and analyzes how this relates to his attitude toward different types of evidence about surgical outcomes. For this, it also examines his contemporaries' approaches to fighting wound disease as well as their evaluation of different kinds of evidence. This article is a contribution to the history of Lister's antisepsis, but also to the history of the production and use of therapeutic knowledge in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century surgery more generally.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB250007062/

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Authors & Contributors
Dupree, Marguerite Wright
Crowther, M. Anne
Worboys, Michael
Schlich, Thomas
Kirkup, John
Igor Telichkin
Concepts
Surgery
Antisepsis
Medicine
Medical education and teaching
Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment
Physicians; doctors
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
Modern
21st century
Places
Great Britain
Germany
London (England)
Scotland
United States
Spain
Institutions
University College, London
Royal Society of London
Royal College of Surgeons, London
St. Bartholomew's Hospital (London)
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