THE BUTCHERING ART Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

Narrator Ralph Lister is working from an excellent text, and this history of the discovery of antiseptic in the latter 1800s can be recommended to a general audience on a number of points. But the horrors of Victorian surgery haven't dimmed in 200 years, and what Joseph Lister did to a dog in the name of science may stop many listeners cold. Ralph Lister is a capable and experienced narrator, but his style of rendering character voices doesn't carry over well into history and biography. For example, must a letter of support from Joseph Lister's students in Glasgow really be read with a brogue? This is a text that requires steadiness and restraint, a narrator who knows how to hold back rather than to accentuate. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2018]