Lister applies an antiseptic wound dressing

The 4 November episode concerned preliminary self-testing, not a documented operation on a patient.

After Snow presented evidence about cholera cases, the local authorities disabled the water pump.

The removal was a public-health response to a concentrated Soho outbreak.

His household interviews and mapping supplied evidence for the decision to stop using the pump.

The outbreak had already begun to subside when the handle was removed; the episode supported later work on waterborne disease.

James Greenlees was the patient whose case became central to Lister’s early account of antiseptic surgery.

The dressing was designed to keep damaging microorganisms from multiplying in an open wound.

Greenlees’s recovery strengthened Lister’s later published argument, although a single case could not establish the method alone.

He told a Berlin scientific society that he had identified the bacterium responsible for TB.

The announcement connected tuberculosis to a specific bacterial agent.