Surgeon Robert Liston: He killed three people in one operation

If you think you had a bad day at work because you poured coffee on the keyboard, screwed up an important deadline, or got a reprimand from your superiors, you are probably not familiar with the unusual case of Robert Liston (1794-1889). On his bad day, three people ended up three meters underground! But let's go in order. This eminent physician, one of the pioneers of Scottish surgery, gained fame throughout Europe with the incredible speed with which he performed surgeries. So, for example, a tumor weighing a record twenty kilograms was removed in less than five minutes, and the leg would be amputated within a period in which you cannot smoke even half a cigarette - in two and a half minutes. It was the virtuosically performed amputations that were his forté, and we are talking about the period before anesthesia came into wider use. In other words, patients sometimes knew how to be "lively" on the operating table, so surgeons, in addition to the skill of handling a scalpel, had to have steel nerves. Shorter surgeries meant less suffering for the patient and a better chance of survival: in case you had to part with your beloved limb, you really wanted it to happen on Liston’s desk… Unless it was a rainy Wednesday in late 1847.

On that fateful morning, Liston was preparing for what he considered a routine leg amputation, and the hall, as was the custom at the time, was filled with a hole for curious spectators. Bets were reportedly falling as well: in how many minutes would Liston separate his leg from the rest of his body? As the patient struggled more than usual, the good doctor chose a young man without much experience in this type of procedure, but with steel biceps, as the assistant who would hold the poor man firmly during the operation. It was, it will turn out, a catastrophic mistake. Did the assistant shake his hand at one point, as some witnesses later claimed? Did Liston lose his proverbial composure or was he in too much of a hurry? It was never fully elucidated, but what followed could be called the only surgery in history with a mortality rate of 300 percent. Sounds impossible but it's not! Namely, Liston broke his personal record by amputating the patient's leg in less than a minute, but inadvertently cut off the assistant's fingers. They both died of sepsis that day, but one time spectator was the first to go to the eternal hunting grounds: the man was so frightened when Liston reached for his coat with the tip of a scalpel that he suffered a heart attack!