Saints and Sinners: Joseph Lister

Saviors as saints or sinners?

Advances in medical science are frequently characterized by two related phenomena. First, they create the opportunity for individuals to make choices previously unavailable and thereby pose new moral questions that challenge both our moral intuitions and social institutions. Second, innovation in healthcare unfolds, both in the sense that its utilization spreads geographically but also that it ...

Testimonial to Sir Joseph Lister

Saints and sinners: lessons about work from daytime TV

Introduction This article looks at the messages given by factual TV programmes to audiences about work, and, in particular, the models of working behaviour that have been presented to them during the period following the 2007‐8 financial crisis. It focuses particularly, but not exclusively, on daytime TV, which has an audience made up disproportionately of people who have low incomes and are po...

Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England

Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?: Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England offers a rich and fascinating study of the National Council of the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (later the National Council for One Parent Families, then One Parent Families and now Gingerbread), a charitable organization that was established to provide support for unmarried mothers and their children. In doing so...

Inflammation , Suppuration , Putrefaction , Fermentation : Joseph Lister

This paper focuses on Lister’s inaugural lecture at King’s College, London, in October 1877. As the new Professor of Clinical Surgery, Lister had much to report, including impressively high survival rates from complex operations previously regarded as foolhardy. Instead, he chose to address the processes of fermentation in wine, blood and milk. His reasons are not obvious to a modern audience, ...