Robert Liston: 'Time Me, Gentlemen' and Europe's First Ether Amputation

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Robert Liston, born in Scotland in 1794, stood six foot two with huge hands and a combative temper in an age when surgery without anesthesia was a race against fatal shock. Surgeons operated in frock coats stiff with old blood and pus, washing was seen as fussy, and Florence Nightingale noted that survival tracked how fast the surgeon finished. Liston was dismissed from the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in 1822 for clashing with superiors, yet he operated for free on the poor of the Grassmarket. When he recognized Mary Paterson, a victim of Burke and Hare, preserved in whiskey in Robert Knox's dissection room, he knocked Knox down and took her body for burial.

Passed over in 1833 for a professorship that went to the slower, methodical James Syme, Liston moved to London and in 1835 became the first professor of clinical surgery at University College Hospital, where he worked in a bottle green coat and Wellington boots and could take off a leg in under two and a half minutes. The famous story of an amputation with 300 percent mortality has no contemporary evidence behind it. His real turning point came on December 21, 1846, when he amputated the leg of butler Frederick Churchill under ether, the first public operation in Europe using modern anesthesia, and declared that the Yankee dodge beat mesmerism hollow.

• The legend of the dead patient, the assistant's lost fingers and the spectator who died of fright
• Holding his knife between his teeth to keep his hands free while operating
• How his endorsement of ether influenced students including James Simpson and Joseph Lister
• His death from an aortic aneurysm in December 1847 at 53, mourned by about 400 former pupils at Highgate
• Inventions still in use, including bulldog forceps, a femur splint and a clear isinglass plaster made from fish swim bladders