Source / Antiseptic apparatus
This steam spray, made in London by instrument maker David Marr and associated with Joseph Lister, dispersed a mist of carbolic acid (phenol) around an operative wound. It materialises one contested part of British antiseptic surgery in the 1870s and 1880s.
The apparatus did not inaugurate Lister's antiseptic work in 1865–67. It was a later attempt to act on germs thought to travel in the air, and its eventual rejection shows how surgical practice changed while the broader aim of preventing wound contamination endured.
Reading the object
The Science Museum Group record attributes this apparatus to Marr and to Lister. A comparable Marr spray in Glasgow explains the mechanism: a spirit lamp heated water, and the steam jet met carbolic solution at the nozzle and carried droplets towards the operative field. The vessels, tubing, burner, and nozzle made an invisible theory into conspicuous equipment.
The record gives a broad date of 1866–1870 and captions the object “c. 1867.” Yet Lister's detailed published directions for a spray appeared in 1871, and surviving sprays passed through several designs. The object therefore cannot securely be identified as the apparatus used in any named 1867 case. Its date and association should be reported as catalogue attributions, not converted into a claim of priority.
Lister reasoned from Louis Pasteur's studies of fermentation and airborne particles that living agents could reach exposed tissue from the atmosphere. In his vocabulary, “putrefaction” meant destructive decomposition in a wound; “septic” referred to material capable of provoking it. These terms overlap with, but are not identical to, present-day categories of infection.
Marr translated a changing surgical method into a portable steam device. An assistant or “dresser” had to fill and light the apparatus, bring it to pressure, aim it, and keep it working while the surgeon operated. The catalogue names Lister and Marr but not the staff who operated this object or the patients exposed to it.
Chronology
1865–67, Glasgow: Lister first applied carbolic preparations to compound fractures at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. His case series began with James Greenlees, admitted on 12 August 1865, and appeared in The Lancet in 1867. The initial system centred on cleansing the wound, carbolic-soaked material, protective dressings, drainage, and careful renewal—not on a steam machine. His 1867 address on the antiseptic principle was an argument by a participant promoting a new practice; its cases are invaluable primary evidence, but they were not a controlled trial and use contemporary diagnostic categories.
1869–71, Edinburgh: Lister moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1869 and continued altering materials and procedures. In an August 1871 address, he described producing an “antiseptic atmosphere” with a watery carbolic solution and a Richardson hand spray. Hand bulbs were followed by foot- or lever-operated devices—the cumbersome “donkey engine”—and then by more portable steam sprays. The Marr object belongs to this evolving family; its broad catalogue date does not reveal exactly where it fits.
1870s–80s, circulation and revision: Lister's publications, demonstrations, students, assistants, and commercial suppliers carried antisepsis between hospitals. Adoption was uneven. Some surgeons accepted the practical precautions without his account of germs; others selected particular dressings or washes; critics objected to expense, complexity, irritation, and uncertain proof. As Michael Worboys shows, success depended on learned sequences and tacit skill as well as on assent to a theory.
A system of work
The spray is easy to display and remember, but William Watson Cheyne's 1882 manual devoted hundreds of pages to the system's principles, materials, wound management, and history. Cheyne had worked with Lister and wrote to teach and defend the method; the book is evidence of a committed practitioner's programme, not a neutral audit of results.
Operative work took place under the spray, but objects touching the wound also had to be treated, and the wound then protected with prepared dressings. Lister repeatedly changed the composition of gauze, putty, ligatures, and solutions in an effort to preserve antiseptic action while reducing tissue damage. A failed detail could be blamed for a failed case, which made the complete method difficult to reproduce and evaluate.
Dressers and assistants prepared materials, maintained the spray, passed treated instruments, and watched that unprotected objects did not touch the field. Hospital procurement and instrument makers supplied chemicals, gauze, tubing, burners, and replacement parts. This material and human infrastructure helps explain why reading instructions was not equivalent to watching Lister's team perform them.
Carbolic acid was caustic and potentially poisonous. Spray dampened the patient, surgeon, and assistants; it irritated skin and airways, made the room pungent, and could fail during an operation. These burdens were not incidental to the technology: they shaped criticism, limited who could tolerate the routine, and encouraged the search for less irritating antiseptics and other methods.
Debate and abandonment
Lister did not simply discover that “air does not matter.” In 1881 he publicly questioned whether the spray was responsible for improved results, because other parts of the method had changed at the same time. By the later 1880s many surgeons had already discarded it. In his 1890 Berlin address, Lister acknowledged that newly drawn-in air could pass through the expanding mist too briefly for its microbes to be killed and argued that other sources of contamination deserved priority. The Science Museum gives 1887 as the year of abandonment, but the primary and historical record describes a period of doubt and disuse rather than a precisely documented single date.
Meanwhile, bacteriological work in German-speaking Europe helped reorganise surgery around asepsis: excluding microorganisms through heat-treated instruments and dressings, controlled spaces, and disciplined contact rather than trying to kill germs after entry with a chemical cloud. Thomas Schlich cautions that this was neither an instant nor total replacement. Antiseptic and aseptic techniques overlapped, practitioners combined them, and British hospitals changed unevenly through the 1890s.
The spray's failure therefore does not disprove the documented importance of the wider reform, and the success of antisepsis does not validate every element of Lister's explanation. The most defensible historical claim is narrower: Lister and many collaborators made wound contamination a problem requiring systematic, repeatable intervention; testing and bacteriology then altered which interventions practitioners considered necessary.
Across the collection
Follow the surgeon's experiments, publications, hospital settings, collaborators, changing methods, and reputation.
Trace the shift from chemical destruction to sterilisation, barriers, operating-room discipline, and infection control.
Compare how material design can embody a theory, redistribute labour, and later become historical evidence.
References
Collection record for the object, including attribution, catalogue date, maker, materials, measurements, collection, and interpretive description. The record itself warns that catalogue information may be revised.
Catalogue record for a comparable Marr steam spray, with an account of its burner-and-nozzle mechanism and the sequence from hand spray to lever-operated and steam devices.
Primary account read to the British Medical Association in Dublin on 9 August 1867 and published on 21 September; DOI: 10.1136/bmj.2.351.246.
Primary description of the antiseptic atmosphere and hand-spray procedure. It records Lister's 1871 rationale and instructions, not an independent evaluation.
Digitised contemporary manual by Lister's former dresser and assistant, valuable for the apparatus, procedures, and labour of an advocated system.
Peer-reviewed analysis of case reports, demonstrations, technical skill, assistants, and the difficulty of transferring a complex practice; DOI: 10.1098/rsnr.2013.0028.
Peer-reviewed study of criticism, teaching, student networks, international circulation, and the adaptation of Listerian methods; DOI: 10.1098/rsnr.2013.0031.
Peer-reviewed account of German bacteriology, the decline of the spray, and the uneven, overlapping development of aseptic practice; DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2012.22.
Historical and scientific review that reproduces Lister's 1881 doubts and his 1890 rejection of the spray's original rationale; DOI: 10.1017/S0950268800066425.
Catalogue record for the August 1963 museum negative and its connection to material accumulated for the 1927 Lister centenary exhibition.