heard the unmistakable sound of pounding feet. Looking up, he saw the emperor of Brazil charging toward him, flush with excitement.
In that moment, Bell’s life was transformed. To the rest of the world, he would no longer be a teacher, or even simply an inventor, but the creator of the telephone. Even as he watched the emperor’s eyes flash with joy and amazement, however, Bell knew that he would reach far beyond this one invention. His mind was too crowded, and his heart too hopeful, to stop here.
While Bell’s technological innovation caught fire in an instant of understanding, on the same fairgrounds, in a building just yards away, Joseph Lister’s discovery, one of the most important advances in medical history, was lightly dismissed. Standing before a crowded hall at the centennial fair’s Medical Congress, the British surgeon struggled to convince his audience, a collection of the most experienced and admired physicians and surgeons in the United States, of the critical importance of antisepsis—preventing infection by destroying germs. Although the men listened politely, very few of them believed what Lister was telling them, and almost none of them seriously considered putting his theory into practice.
At a time when many well-respected scientists still scoffed at the idea of germs, Lister’s time-consuming and complicated system for destroying them seemed ridiculous. Lister, however, knew that the difference between his method and the old method was nothing less than the difference between life and death. He had developed antiseptic medicine eleven years earlier, after realizing that the same microorganisms that caused wine to ferment in Louis Pasteur’s experiments must also cause infection in wounds. Lister applied this theory to his own patients, creating an elaborate system of sterilization using carbolic acid, and transforming his surgical ward from the typical foul-smelling horror chamber that defined nineteenth-century hospitals to a place of daily miracles.
Although the results were dramatic—the death rate among Lister’s surgical patients immediately plummeted—antisepsis had provoked reactions of deep skepticism, even fury. In England, Lister had been forced repeatedly to defend his theory against attacks from enraged doctors. “The whole theory of antisepsis is not only absurd,” one surgeon seethed, “it is a positive injury.” Another charged that Lister’s “methods would be a return to the darkest days of ancient surgery.”
By 1876, Lister’s steady and astonishing success had silenced nearly all of his detractors at home and in Europe. The United States, however, remained inexplicably resistant. Most American doctors simply shrugged off Lister’s findings, uninterested and unimpressed. Even Dr. Samuel Gross, the president of the Medical Congress and arguably the most famous surgeon in the country, regarded antisepsis as useless, even dangerous. “Little, if any faith, is placed by any enlightened or experienced surgeon on this side of the Atlantic in the so-called carbolic acid treatment of Professor Lister,” Gross wrote imperiously.
The medical breakthroughs that won the attention and admiration of men like Gross were those they could readily understand. All around the Medical Congress, throughout the centennial fair, were examples of this type of practical progress. There was a much-admired exhibit of artificial limbs, “The Palmer Leg and Arm,” which were of particular interest in the wake of the Civil War. Dr. B. Frank Palmer himself wore an articulated leg of his own design, with impressive results. “We did not in the least suspect that he had himself been provided with one of his own artificial limbs,” marveled one of the judges. Down another aisle stood a pyramid of eight hundred ounces of pure morphine, and there were table after table of new and improved medical tools. Admiring a sturdy saw meant for amputations, one surgeon asked rhetorically, “Who has not experienced the annoyance, in the middle of an operation, of the saw breaking or becoming wedged in the bone so tightly as to be disengaged with difficulty?”
The dangers Lister described were very different from, and far more lethal than, broken saws and inadequate prosthetics. They could not be seen by the naked eye, and many of the doctors in the audience still did not believe they existed. Despite the prevailing skepticism about his discovery, however, Lister refused to give up. If the scientific evidence he presented was not enough, he would appeal to something more powerful than logic: vanity. He would remind these doctors who they were, and what they, as a nation, had achieved. “American surgeons are renowned throughout the world for their inventive genius, and boldness and skill in execution,” he said. “It is to America that we owe anesthesia, the