Abstract
An important aspect of Joseph Lister's work that has received relatively little attention is his relationship with patients. However, a manuscript written by one of his patients, Margaret Mathewson's ‘A Sketch of Eight Months a patient, in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, A.D. 1877’, provides detail about the surgeon as seen ‘from below’—that is, by a charity patient. Although excerpts from Mathewson's ‘Sketch’ have previously been published, an earlier version of the ‘Sketch’ has only recently been identified as such. That earlier version represents Lister not only as actively concerned with patient education, but also as strongly supportive of patients' rights, encouraging ward patients to report maltreatment at the hands of the staff.
Highlights
In the summer of 1877, Joseph Lister returned from London, where he had been involved in negotiations for his new position as Professor of Clinical Surgery at King’s College Medical School, to spend his final months in Edinburgh
Margaret Mathewson’s ‘Sketch’ was not published, even in excerpt form, for more than 100 years, and the excerpts that were published came only from a manuscript copy that, as I have explained, is a revision of earlier versions. In those earlier versions this patient documents an aspect of Lister and his staff’s treatment of his patients that I believe has not been described anywhere else. She tells us that staff members were expected to teach patients the medical knowledge and nursing skills they needed to know to care for themselves and to help their family and friends in remote locations in Scotland where trained medical practitioners were often unavailable
Was Lister unique in encouraging patients to complain about abusive treatment? Or is this an aspect of nineteenth-century hospital policy that was more widespread in British hospitals than has been suspected? Margaret Mathewson’s ‘Sketch’ re-frames our image of Victorian hospital patients and should inspire further investigation of the history of patient power in British hospitals
Summary
In the summer of 1877, Joseph Lister returned from London, where he had been involved in negotiations for his new position as Professor of Clinical Surgery at King’s College Medical School, to spend his final months in Edinburgh. This work included excerpts from Mathewson’s ‘Sketch’ and some of her letters, along with poems and letters by Henley, who had been a private patient of Lister’s in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh earlier in the 1870s, and various writings by other medical contemporaries of Lister.[10] The excerpts in Goldman’s book, misleadingly designated there as held in the Glasgow University Library, were based on a manuscript owned by John Graham of Lerwick, Shetland, but held in the Shetland Archives.
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