In 1869 Lister succeeded his father-in-law, Syme, in the chair of clinical surgery of Edinburgh. There his chief accomplishments were his researches in bacteriology, his substitution of the dressings of absorbent gauze for the non-absorbing lac plaster and his attempt to provide an atmosphere free from microbes by means of a spray of a 1-20 watery solution of carbolic acid. The efficacy of this famous spray, which was used all over the continent, was questioned by Bruns of Tübingen in his paper, Fort mit dem Spray of 188o, and Lister himself was beginning to be dubious about the harmfulness of atmospheric dust. At the London Con gress in 1881, he narrated experiments which proved both that the serum of the blood is unfavourable for the development of the bacteria swarming in the air and that the cells of an organizing blood-clot have a remarkable power of disposing of microbes and of limiting their advance. Finally, in 1887, Lister abandoned the spray, having come to the conclusion that the air might be dis regarded in operations. The spray had served the purpose of maintaining a pure condition of the entourage of the operation, and Lister now had to emphasize the necessity for redoubled vigilance on the part of the surgeon and his assistants when his "unconscious caretaker," as he called it, was disregarded.
In 1877 Lister accepted the chair of surgery at King's college, London, which he held for 15 years. While there, the publication of Koch's book on the etiology of traumatic infectious diseases led him to experiment with various mercurial preparations, until he finally adopted a double cyanide of mercury and zinc. In 1896 he retired from practice, but not from scientific study.
From 1895 to 190o he was president of the Royal Society, and in 1896 president of the British Association. In 1883 he was created a baronet, and in 1897 was raised to the peerage as Baron Lister of Lyme Regis. Among the Coronation honours in 1902, he was nominated an original member of the new Order of Merit. He died at Walmer, Kent, on Feb. Io, 1912. The best monument to Lister is the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, London—of which he was one of the founders at its inception as the British Institute of Preventive Medicine in 1891. It was modelled on the Pasteur institute in Paris. On the continent he was every more renowned, the German surgeons, especially Thiersch and Volkmann, being the first to adopt his ligature technique and his aseptic treatment which had banished for ever the prevalent surgical pests—pyaemia, septicaemia, erysipelas and hospital gangrene. Among Lister's contributions to general surgery, Godlee (see below) mentions his new amputation through the condyles of the femur, his new operation for excision of the wrist joint and for carcinoma of the breast, his improved surgery of the bladder and urethra and his introduction of such instru ments as the aortic tourniquet, the wire needle, the ear hook, the sinus forceps, the urethral bougies and the forceps for extracting stones from the prostatic urethra.
See Lister's Collected Papers, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1909) ; R. J. Godlee, Lord Lister (Oxford, 1924) ; W. Cheyne, Lister and his Achievement (1925) ; and A. Turner, Joseph, Baron Lister, centenary vol. (Edinburgh, 1927).