Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister was a Quaker surgeon in Glasgow and Edinburgh who read Pasteur on fermentation, concluded that the suppuration that killed half of all amputees was caused by living germs from the air, and in 1865 began dressing wounds with carbolic acid. On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery of 1867 reports the results: his wards, which had been among the worst in Britain, became the safest. Surgeons resisted for a decade and then adopted the principle everywhere, and asepsis followed. He was made a baron and president of the Royal Society, and the mouthwash was named after him without his consent.