Here is everything we know about the infamous surgery performed with a 300% mortality rate, making it the only one in the world for all the wrong reasons.
This is long before anesthesia was introduced to the world of medicine and surgeries would be painful and terrifying.
So, the focus was on the speed of procedures which is how Robert Liston became famous.
Renowned for his speedy operations, including his record-breaking 28-second leg amputation, Liston’s cases became famous.
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However, one particular case is notorious for more morbid reasons, as these surgeries didn’t always go to plan.
In an effort to perform this amputation as quickly as possible, Liston removed the patient’s leg in under two and a half minutes.
But in his haste, the surgeon had also accidentally slashed the coat tails of a spectator.
The person was so terrified by what had happened, that he dropped dead from terror.
In the process, Liston had also accidentally sliced off three fingers of his surgical assistant.
Following the surgery, both the assistant and the patient came down with gangrene and both of them died a few days later.
This gave the operation a 300% mortality rate and is still the only surgery in the world with that rate.
This wasn’t the only surgery that went wrong for Liston as, in another case, he attended to a young boy who presented a pulsating tumor in his neck.
Liston diagnosed this as an abscess, although his house surgeon disagreed, claiming that it looked more like a carotid artery aneurysm.
Arguing over the matter, Liston said: “Whoever heard of an aneurysm in one so young?”
The man went on to quickly lance the lesion and was soon proven wrong when the boy almost immediately bled to death after haemorrhaging out from the damaged aneurysm.
With the story of Liston’s work resurfacing online, many people have taken to social media to share their own reactions to his most famous (and most deadly) case.
On X, formerly Twitter, one user said: “Fastest surgeon alive… until someone dies from sheer terror. Robert Liston: surgical legend, human horror story.”
Another said: “Absolute legend or madman? Operating like a duelist with a knife in his teeth. History’s OG speed surgeon!”
A third person commented: “This is the craziest s*** I’ve ever heard.”
And a fourth added: “You know what it’s my fault for having this app.”