The one about the speedy surgeon. Robert Liston was a surgeon in 1800s England. He became legendary for his speed with a knife. Was he a lunatic or just a good doctor doing his best?
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Liston
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_and_Hare_murders
Loose Transcript:
Hi everyone and welcome or welcome back to another episode of nightmare now. I’m the host, Erik Byrne. Today’s episode is gonna be another short one, lets say truncated or even amputated. It opens up a whole topic of medical horror like a bonesaw to an artery. I’d love to do more episodes on the wider subject of the insane stuff humanity used to call medicine, but I’ll split that up and sprinkle it into the feed at large over time. I don’t want to spend too many episodes in a row on one particular topic. Maybe if I was doing this in seasons or something, but for right now I’m gonna jump all over time and space like I’ve got cosmic ADD. Maybe down the line I’ll curate collections of episodes on broader topics like medicine, history or animals, but for that to happen I need to pump out more of that thick squidgy content. So without further ado I would like to jump right into the blood and guts of today’s episode. I give you the fastest knife in the west end, the slickest slicer south of the north sea, Robert liston!
Robert liston was a prolific surgeon in britain from around 1818 to his death in 1847. He was born in late october of 1794 to a minister and inventor in Scotland. He grew up fascinated with medicine and anatomy and after a rudimentary schooling as a boy went on to attend medical school in edinburgh (edin-bruh). He left for a while to study under this guy william blizard in London and eventually returned to edinburgh to teach anatomy there before becoming a surgeon and then kind of bounced between london and edinburgh throughout his life. He got canned in edinburgh and moved to london, came back then went back to london where he lived out the remainder of his days. He married a wine merchant’s daughter along the way who isn’t mentioned in most of the articles and the one’s she’s in don’t even really give her name. Give the ladies some coverage too c’mon! Given her absence in most of the literature here I, I don’t think there’s much relevance to me covering her either. Sorry mrs Liston, I’m sure he couldn’t have done it all without you. We’ll take a brief second to pour out a whiskey for the happy couple and make a note to find some strong women leads for future horror stories on the show.
Back to old robert, that covers most of the biographical information of any relevance to the medical insanity we’re going to be jumping into today. I think he’d appreciate the brevity and cutting to the chase as you’ll soon find out. So during this time period of history, people had a Fairly good idea of how most of the human body worked and how to fix a lot of the medical issues people had. But it certainly was far from perfect. I mean even today we’re far from perfect. Reminds me of a time I tried to give blood like two years ago and they had to take the needle in and out 3 or four times because they weren’t getting any flow. After squeezing the stupid rod for ten minutes and not filling a drop of the blood bag, 2 nurses and a doctor later some tech figured out that they had crimped the wrong tube. They just gave me the coupon for the free whopper or whatever and told me to get out of there, so there’s kind of individual incompetence like that and societal incompetence like the fact that back then other surgeons thought you were a pussy if you washed your hands before or after a surgery.
Most notably and most relevant at the time though was that speed of the operation was of the essence. The longer you went with an open body cavity or bleeding stump from an amputation, your chances of dying skyrocketed up. You lost more blood, you became more susceptible to infection, (although that wasn’t really well understood at the time), and you just have an overall lower chance of survival. Enter Robert Liston. He really, really leaned into the faster surgery good, slow methodical surgery bad. And now we’re getting into the reason this dude gets his own episode on my prestigious show.
Picture this, your leg is green and sickly from some horrible 1800s infection probably just from stepping on a tomato that somebody stored their sewing needles in or something. Before antibiotics and other more modern inventions or discoveries it was just kinda like, that’s gotta go. And then it’s we let you keep your shrek leg and you’re guaranteed to die, or we chop that s**t off and you’ve got like a one in four chance of dying. Han solo was right when he said never tell me the odds I guess.
Dr Liston’s whole schtick was that given a faster surgery you had a more likely chance to survive, why not take that to its logical conclusion and go for the speedrun records? Liston wasn’t called the fastest knife in the west end for nothing, he would perform an operation to amputate a limb, that means from the first slice, having the flesh cleaved away, the bone sawn through and the stump stitched back up in Twenty Eight seconds flat. I can barely imagine that. Most podcast ads are about thirty seconds so next time you’re listening to something that isn’t this show, take note when there’s an ad and imagine someone being strapped down with buckles, held down by assistants, have their hand sliced off and sawn through, all the while screaming and writhing, blood squirting everywhere while Liston is looking down on him with his knife literally in his mouth because he doesn’t have time to put it down to switch to the bone saw. Then stitched back up to become captain hook, and he yells at his assistant with a wild look in his eye “time! how fast was that?” Seriously, every article on this guy is called some variation of “time me gentlemen! Time me” because that was his catch phrase before a surgery. He would show up and make sure people had their stopwatches out before he got started. Everyone just had those in 1800s england. Aside from all the blood and screaming, twas a silly place.
Liston may have been a cocky lunatic but he basically had every right to be. He was easily the fastest surgeon around and he had a far better mortality rate than most hospitals and other surgeons could claim at the time. I mentioned earlier his one in four surviving operations versus one in eight to ten averaged out elsewhere. Beyond the RBI he’s working with, liston was overall a pretty good guy, sure a bunch of people died under his knife, but who hasn’t gotten zapped playing the operation game once or twice.
He would actually hang out outside of rival hospitals and when people got turned away because they were quote un quote “beyond helping” he would be like “look, no guarantees but your gonna die if you don’t get some kind of treatment and I’m right here with my liston knife and stopwatch if you want a chance to live… maybe…” Yes a liston knife, he invented himself a new kind of amputation knife to speed up the procedures. And he would just chop em up right there. Maybe he took them to an operating room, the literature is unclear. It’s funnier if you imagine he’s doing this in the parking lot of a rival hospital. Through getting victims, erm patients like this he probably saved a good deal of lives that didn’t have much of a shot at survival anyway. Pioneered isn't really the right term but, liston certainly championed, making people comfortable and assuring them stuff was okay, when it was most definitely not okay. He wasn’t always the most, let’s say “tactful” with this, in one example a guy was getting a foot amputated for frostbite but he got cold feet. Huh? Huh? Cold feet? Anyway he panics before the operation and locks himself in a bathroom. Liston tells him from the outside “it’s all gonna be fine mate”, and just hears back “noooo I’m not ready” He replies, “I am, you’re gonna be alright, but I got tea time in 3 and a half minutes!” He breaks down the door like he’s f**king jack torrance “EERS ROBBY” yanks him out and straps him down. Successfully performs the operation and the guy goes on to be a renowned boat captain. I don’t know if it was actually frostbite but the pun was too good to pass up.
Furthermore, on being a great guy, he stood up for hygienic practices that were not yet commonplace at the time, for example washing your hands. He would argue with more senior surgeons about so-called experience, saying it didn’t matter as much how long you’ve been doing surgery, it was rather how many surgeries you had done that accumulated experience, something that I would tend to agree with. If any surgeons are listening let me know at nightmarenowpodcast@gmail.com what you think, or fact check me or whatever you like. One more really interesting side note on liston is that he was also tangentially involved in catching a pair of serial killers operating in london in 1828, for more information on that take a gander at the Burke and Hare murders. This was a rabbit hole, maybe a hare hole I couldn’t really go down to deep on this episode but the gist of it was that in this era, corpses for surgical practice and medical study were extremely difficult to get ahold of, basically the only way to get one legally (with a big airquotes around legally because even this was shady) was if the deceased was some guttersnipe or foundling with no familial ties, found dead. Or if you wanted to go the more nefarious route, paying a ghoul or graverobber for a fresh body right out of the cemetery. I’ll definitely cover all this grave robber stuff on a future episode because there’s a whole ghastly arms race of people getting better at stealing bodies and people making all kinds of ridiculous inventions to prevent it after they died, like a giant wrought iron cage around their coffin.
Medical students and schools would have to pay for these bodies, and to these two guys burke and hare, it was good enough money that after a girl died in their motel and they sold the body they figured they could just cut out the grim reaping middle man and just kill people and sell the bodies for a great rate on account of the freshness. Maybe we’ll go more in depth on them in another episode but thats the basic gist of the case as far as relevant details to Liston.
So one day Liston was dealing with this dude, Robert Knox, who was another surgeon and pretty close to a sort of archetypal “rival” character to liston. He shows up at his office, or operating room or lab or whatever it is and sees this girl that suspiciously got there within HOURS of her death, for experimentation. God what a f**king ghoulish time right? He paid Burke and Hare 8 pounds for her. Adjusted for inflation, that's like 930~ish british pounds or a little over twelve hundred us dollars. Liston thinks this whole thing is weird, and then Dr knox puts her naked body in this lewd display preserving her in whiskey for a long time, like months, before he’s set to do the autopsy. That seemed extremely disrespectful to the body of this woman, Mary Paterson, even for the time period. Liston sees all this still happening next time he comes by and just beats the everliving f**k out of knox, Liston was 6’2’’ and pretty jacked, I don’t know if I mentioned that yet. After he puts knox on his a** he take’s mary’s body and tells knox to f**k off, and gives her a proper burial.
Later on the police would finally catch Burke and Hare by interrogating Knox, but not before they killed sixteen people for cash. Liston wasn’t all great all the time, however. He may have been the fastest surgeon around but that didn’t always lend itself to making him the most careful. I want to take a few minutes and go over some of his most famous screw ups. Some of the sources swear the veracity of these claims and some of them say they might be apocryphal, embellished or outright fake. It’s more fun if we take all this at face value because old Robert had himself a few big oopsies under his belt by the end of his career.
One notable one that he didn’t technically f**k up, it’s just wild is this dude had a scrotal tumor that weighed like fifty pounds. He had to carry his nuts around in a wheelchair. I think I saw a TV show where that happened in modern times and the dude just wore an upside down hoodie as sweatpants. That’s definitely a nikola tesla “you will witness man made horrors beyond your comprehension” moment to have that on TV. Who would do a piece of exploitative media like that on horrific topics? Hmm…
Moving on. As far as I can tell the guy lived, I don’t know if he could spread his scrotum skin to turn into a flying squirrel at the point but I’m afraid to do any more research on that.
Speaking of nuts there was another case where liston was amputating a leg and got quote “Overzealous” during the operation and in his attempt at breaking the land speed record of a knife went right through and lopped off the guy’s testicles too. In his defense he did manage to take the leg off in under two and a half minutes. I just don’t know if taking the testicles off counts as a bonus time or penalty time. I also can’t find word on whether or not that guy survived or not. Maybe he didn’t want to at that point. It’s not an easy time to be alive overall especially with one leg and no nuts.
Another hilariously gruesome operation, and this time I’m using the term operation very loosely, was when Liston was brought, a young boy. The boy had a red pulsing mass on his neck and liston got into an argument with another surgeon about what to do. This is where his legendary confidence didn’t do him a whole lot of favors. While arguing about whether or not the growth was a run of the mill skin abscess or a more deadly carotid arterial aneurysm, Liston reportedly paused mid sentence, yelled POOH, Who ever has heard of an aneurysm in one so young as this!!” He then whipped a scalpel out of his pocket and sliced it. Arterial blood started shooting out immediately and the kid died very very soon after that. He was how do we say, “Dead wrong”
Finally we reach his most famous case, which may be partially, or entirely fake, but again for the sake of EDUTAINMENT value here we’re gonna take it at face value. This is the only reason most people have ever heard of Liston. He was performing a routine, As routine as this slapdash bloody affair could get, amputation of a leg again. Presumably he was trying to beat his speed record. So he’s there, the patient is there tweaking out because he’s about to lose a leg, and he’s got a few assistants helping hold this mf down. Furthermore he has a couple of people watching, either to learn from him or just because I don’t know video games weren’t invented yet and watching people get sawed apart was the next best thing. There’s a reason they’re called operating theaters after all. Right?
I wanted to narrate this like an old timey horse race or friggin UFC fight or something being like
He’s starting right from the word go, old knifey comes out of the gate swinging and starts sawing with reckless abandon timothy you ever see anything like this in all your broadcasting years? Oh there’s the blood, he’s splitting a bone and oh what’s this what’s this, Collateral! I’ve never seen anything like this!
That gets old quick, anyway, he hacks through the leg and everything, and I mean everything, part of the table, and more importantly two of his assistants fingers. That’s gotta be a speed record at least for a triple amputation right? No he’s going for a bigger record. So while listons cleaving through multiple limbs like he’s doing a mortal kombat finisher he swings even wider afterward and rips the bonesaw through an onlookers coat. This is an old man and after seeing a leg and two fingies get tossed onto the ground the fear from thinking he’s been stabbed by the blade liston’s working like it’s a f**king black and decker turkey carver the old guy has a heart attack and dies right there on the floor. He didn’t even get so much as a nick, just straight up fear killed him. Scarecrow would be proud. So he’s gone. Nothing they can do about the old fella, so they go back to look at the patient and the new assistant slash patient. Liston and the other assistants rush these guys to the hospital in to see what they can do but both the assistant and the original patient develop an infection from slicing through each other. And both of them succumb to those infections within days. It wasn’t uncommon what was uncommon was Liston performing the worlds first, and as far as I know only surgery with a three hundred percent mortality rate. That’s crazy I don’t care who you is. You try to fix one person and and end up killing three and still get a statue of yourself put up one hundred years later. Any statue people make of me will inevitably be torn down once the masses discover my vulgar podcast.
Liston’s career wasn’t all blood and gore however. In fact he was partially responsible for ending his own wild west brand of hibachi surgery. He ended up being the first person to do a public surgery with the aid of anesthetic. He even had to roast americans while he did it even though we invented it. He said something to the effect of “let’s see how these yankee shenanigans work lads” and did a surgery on a dude after blasting his nose full of chloroform. Reportedly the guy woke up after the chloroform, WITHOUT A LEG, and asked when the operation was gonna happen and he was scared because he wasn’t ready, boy did he get a rude awakening when they lifted the sheet for him.
That was a big hit, and from then on people have been using anesthetics so you don’t have to do a speedrun every time you do a surgery ever since. That was 1846. He died about a year later from ironically, an aneurysm and is remembered today through content hungry podcasts. That wraps up the story of robert liston, now it’s up to you to decide! Was he a lunatic murderer or a good doctor doing the best he could. I recorded this in advance as well but this is the last one. After this release things are hopefully week to week or at least every two weeks. I’ll have had a website built by now at nightmarenow.com. That’s where you’ll find the shownotes, pictures, blog posts, all the links to the sosh meeds and anything else you might want to find about the show. Again, I’m so glad you took the time to take a listen to my little project here and I can’t wait to grow this show and community together! Have a great week everyone!