Joseph Lister was born in Upton, England in 1827 and studied in London and Edinburgh. He had read about Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease and realised that germs were also to blame for the high surgical death rate at the time. He introduced carbolic acid as an antiseptic into surgery, and found that the death rate fell to just 15 per cent. He went on to make lint dressings and discovered heat sterilisation, reducing the death rate even further. In 1897 he was made a Baron by Queen Victoria, and he died fifteen years later aged 84.
