[54] On 1 July 1848, Lister received a letter full of warmth and love from his father where his last meeting was "...sunshine after a refreshing shower, following a time of cloud" and advised him to "cherish a pious cheerful spirit, open to see and to enjoy the bounties and the beauties spread around us :—not to give way to turning thy thoughts upon thyself nor even at present to dwell long on serious things".

[60][65] While examining in an autopsy an excision of the elbow of a little boy who had died of pyaemia, Lister noticed that a thick yellow-pus was present at the seat of the humerus bone, and distended the brachial and axillary veins.

[50] On 26 June 2013, medical historian Ruth Richardson and orthopaedic surgeon Bryan Rhodes published a paper in which they described their discovery of Lister's first operation, made while both were researching his career.

[83] He won the Longridge Prize For the greatest proficiency evinced during the three years immediately preceding, on the Sessional Examinations for Honours in the classes of the Faculty of Medicine of the College; and for creditable performance of duties of offices at the Hospitalthat included a £40 stipend.

[100] Lister was anxious about his first appointment but decided to settle in Edinburgh after meeting Syme, who embraced him with open arms, invited him to dinner, and offered him an opportunity to assist him in his private operations.

[19] During this period, Lister presented a paper at the Royal Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical Society on the structure of cancellous exostoses that had been removed by Syme, demonstrating that the method of ossification of these growths is the same as that which occurs in epiphyseal cartilage.

[137] Later in life, Lister stated that he considered his research into inflammation to have been an "essential preliminary" to his conception of the antiseptic principle and insisted that these early findings be included in any memorial volume of his work.

[141] In September 1855, Lister's first experiment was on the artery of a frog viewed under his microscope, subjected to a water droplet of differing temperatures, to determine the early stage of inflammation.

[153] The prevailing theory was from Benjamin Ward Richardson, who won the 1857 Astley Cooper triennial prize for an essay where he postulated that blood remained liquid due to the presence of ammonia.

[154] Lister's third paper,[155][156] published in 1858 in the same journal and read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 1 December 1856,[155] concerned the histology and function of the minute structures of involuntary muscle fibres.

[160] This first experiment, as opposed to purely microscope work,[82] determined the nature of the flow of chyle in the lymphatics and whether the lacteals in the gastrointestinal wall could absorb solid granules from the lumen.

[173] In October 1857, the referee for Philosophical Transactions John Goodsir wrote to Sharpey who warned Lister that the experimental conclusions were similar to findings by the German physiologist Eduard Friedrich Wilhelm Pflüger.

In the conclusions of the paper, Lister linked his experimental observations to physical clinical conditions, for example skin damage resulting from boiling water and trauma occurring after a surgical incision.

[149] Lister stated that "this observation is of fundamental importance, since it proves that the inhibitory influence does not operate directly upon the muscular tissue, but upon the nervous apparatus by which its contractions are, under ordinary circumstances, elicited".

[203][204] Lister concluded, "...it appears that the intestines possess an intrinsic ganglionic apparatus which is in all cases essential to the peristaltic movements, and, while capable of independent action, is liable to be stimulated or checked by other parts of the nervous system".

[216] After his first session, he wrote favourably of Glasgow: The facilities I have here for prosecuting this course as compared to the difficulties I laboured under in Edinburgh are quite delightful – museums, abundant material and a good library all at my disposal and my colleague Allen Thompson co-operating in the kindest and most valuable manner[219]In August 1860, Lister was visited by his parents, who took a "saloon" carriage on the Great Northern Railway.

[g][236] In the first edition, Lister examined the history of amputation from Hippocrates to Thomas Pridgin Teale, William Hey, François Chopart, Nikolay Pirogov and Dominique Jean Larrey[237] and the discovery of the tourniquet by Etienne Morel.

[265] Lister had not been a wide reader of continental literature,[264] but began reading the weekly journal Comptes rendus hebdomadaires of the French Academy of Sciences in the years 1860-1863 where Pasteur discussed fermentation and putrefaction.

Lister was particularly interested in the efficacy of filtration and repeated many of Pasteur's experiments in modified form for instruction in his class,[282] but eventually excluded the first two techniques as not applicable for the treatment of wounds.

Lister discovered[h] that Frederick Crace Calvert, an honorary chemistry professor from the Royal Manchester Institution was manufacturing small quantities of phenol at a much finer purity and managed to obtain some.

[287][307] He applied a piece of lint dipped in carbolic acid solution onto the wound of an 11-year-old boy, James Greenlees, who sustained a compound fracture after a cart wheel passed over his left leg.

[313] The patient was John Hainy, a 21-year-old casting moulder in an iron foundry, who had been supervising a crane when a chain broke and a metal box, containing a sand mould weighing 12 hundredweight or 1,344 pounds (609.6 kg), fell from a height of four feet and landed obliquely on his left leg.

[322] In a letter to his father he stated "...cases of abscess treated in this way is so beautifully in harmony with the theory of the whole subject of suppuration, and besides the treatment is now rendered so simple and easy for any one to put in practice, that it really charms me".

[339] His appeal to the reader, in essence, to surgical consensus, was: "To prevent the occurrence of suppuration, with all its attendant risks, was an object manifestly desirable", and refers to the surgeon's dread of pus appearing in an inflamed wound.

[342] At the end of the paper, he stated that on the basis of his new antiseptic theory "a really trustworthy treatment for compound fractures and other severe contused wounds has been established for the first time, so far as I am aware, in the history of surgery".

[citation needed] Simpson claimed that Lister's prior article had copied a continental practice[352] and accused him of plagiarising the work of French doctor and pharmacist Jules Lemaire.

He used the work of William Pirrie, professor of surgery at Aberdeen University, who had used acupressure to stop pus formation during breast cancer operations, to illustrate his point, that there had been no deaths from pyaemia at the hospital, compared to the many deathd in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Lister replied with a short note on 9 November[366] to ask the reader to: "to judge for themselves how far the present attack admits of justification, promising to publish additional articles on his antiseptic technique".

[394] This was clearly illustrated in October 1877[395] when a patient, Lizzie Thomas, who travelled from the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary to be treated for a Psoas abscess, was not admitted due to not having the correct paperwork.

[426] Like all internal surgery at the time, the appendectomy needed by the King still posed an extremely high risk of death by post-operational infection, and surgeons did not dare operate without consulting Britain's leading surgical authority.