Talk:Robert Liston

Undoing vandalism
After saving this message, I will be copying-and-pasting the article content from the edit of 19:43 24 December 2009, when the article was intact. The next edit of 11:40 14 April 2010 comprised vandalism, with a change from that which is found at the citation - something that is extremely easy to verify. The article should have been reverted at that point. However, there were some further vandalistic edits, and the integrity of the article increasingly deteriorated. The last edit at which the article integrity was not compromised was 19:43 24 December 2009, so that is the date from which I will copy-and-paste. I could not revert to that date because of intervening edits, including further vandalism.

In future, any editors noticing vandalism on this article are asked to REVERT, and place a warning on the vandal's talk page, so as to set in train the process for banning any repitions of behaviour. Note that the mere fact of an editor having an IP address does not denote vandalism. It is the behaviour of the editor that denotes vandalism, whether IP or not. Wotnow (talk) 05:02, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I have now incorporated constructive edits as found. Thankyou to those editors. Wotnow (talk) 05:25, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Cleanup-reorganize
I added the cleanup-reorganize template to this page. I'm not entirely certain if this is the correct template to use - however this article is structured in a very strange manner. Heavy quotation, intro section reads as an extended history, sections such as "Liston's firsts" and "Liston's most famous cases" read perhaps as trivia... Overall, needs work. I'm just not exactly certain what type of work, as I'm not very familiar with WP:BIOG. Thanks to anyone who can help. ✰oaoii/ talk 04:01, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Thankyou for your contribution. I agree there is more to be done with this article. When I encountered it, the article was a stub. "Liston's firsts" and "most famous cases" are not just trivia. They are pointers to exactly that which Liston has become famous for, and which should be further elaborated on to give context and minimise any tendencies towards caricature.
 * In popular knowledge, many people outside of certain medical circles became aware of Liston primarily due to his "most famous cases", which have entered popular culture but which many of those perpetuating make no effort to source, probably because few people know how to find information, and even fewer people care, because those who know how also know it takes time and effort. The result is increasing deterioration of information integrity, and increasingly apocryphal caricatures.
 * So when I encountered the article stub, an unsourced mention of Liston's 'most famous' case had been deleted, and rightly so, given that it was in a section called "Fast Surgeon Jokes", the context of which only perpetuates the problem of ill-informed caricature.
 * The irony to that is that the primary public source of these 'famous cases' Richard Gordon, did not just do caricature. He was a well-studied man with a medical background, who was also a reasonably good researcher, as those of us who have paid some attention to his background have learned. The Wikipedia article, like many articles, has very little depth or breadth about Gordon, reiterating as it does that which is known from popular culture. So Gordon didn't just write about Liston's 'failures'. He put them into a context, and he made sure that the reader knew that there was a bit more to Liston than a simple caricature arising from a few cases that can be written about in an entertaining way.
 * As I happen to have Gordon's book, I figured I could put that particular bit right. That is, there are some 'famous cases', there is a (secondary) source, and that source did do his research, which means the primary source exists to be found by anyone who wants to make the effort to track it down. I am someone who has an extremely good track record of tracking down primary sources prior to the internet, so I know for certain these things can be done, albeit at the cost of time, effort, and sometimes money (and yes, only fools go to the lengths that I have sometimes gone to, but I nevertheless proved to my own satisfaction what is possible).
 * However, if I simply added the 'famous cases' from Gordon's book, I would be doing an injustice to Liston's legacy, which anyone with more knowledge of him than I, would know. Therefore, I added enough text to give a more neutral overview of this man, and to put Gordon's own writing into context.
 * More can be done with this article, but stuffing around with the existing text won't get it far. Wikipedia is a bit infamous for edit-warring and drive-by tagging, and what a waste of time that is - Wikipedia's ongoing viability is far from guaranteed. This article, and others need people to read the resources provided, and ADD material, then restructure so it reads sensibly. This is the challenge which I invite anyone who cares enough to do. The template added is a good prompt for this, and probably about as suitable as can be found for the purpose intended. Wotnow (talk) 08:37, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Vandalism in the guise of editing?
After saving this comment, I am going to undo yet another bit of stuffing around with this article that has the appearance of vandalism under the guise of innocuous editing. This pertains to changes to QUOTES. Hello? A quote is not a paraphrase - it is verbatim. This is such an extremely basic aspect of research (like one of the VERY first things you learn) that there are no excuses for someone proclaiming to be a researcher not knowing it. A person either needs to learn it (and ipso facto is not yet a researcher, but of course may soon be), or the person is being a bit skulduggerous.

In the current case, I suspect vandalism, because it's the same pattern as that which I noted above. Changes to citations, resulting in decreased integrity of the article. So, I'm going to copy-and-paste the text from the last edit that was a reasonable change. If there are any editors who pay attention to this article and genuinely care, you might want to keep an eye out for these "subtle" changes. They're not that subtle. A quote is a quote is a quote. Change the wording and it is no longer a quote. So there's no excuses for anyone with the most basic understanding of research.

Now in this case the quotes do portray Richard Gordon's style in writing on Robert Liston. If you want the article to read differently, ADD more information first, with verifiable sources, then rework it so that it doesn't rely on Gordon's quotes. Even if I reworked the article so that it no longer used the quotes, or reworked the article so that Gordon's work was paraphrased and not portrayed as quotes, I would of course still refer to Gordon's work somewhere, because it's out there in popular culture, and one would be completely incompetent to pretend to research on Robert Liston and not notice. Lots of people now quote stuff which is these days - with the beauty of the internet - easily traceable to Richard Gordon. So only an incompetent researcher is not going to figure that out. Wotnow (talk) 03:03, 18 October 2010 (UTC) (Grammatical correction to my text. I was never happy with my error, I just kept forgetting it. Wotnow (talk) 22:29, 3 November 2010 (UTC)).


 * I have now made the change. A note to any editors who do care who might be paying attention to this page. Any changes to quotes should always be suspect, especially if the quote is from an online and readily verifiable source. If you spot such changes, compare the quote with the source. If it's not the same, revert or - if serial bastardry has occurred - just copy-and-paste from an earlier unbastardised version. I especially challenge any Scottish editors to keep an eye out for, and undo, any bastardry. The clear impression of Robert Liston is that he was a Scotsman to be admired. A man of integrity and intellect, with a blunt style and the courage to take on people and challenges - an act worth following. Wotnow (talk) 03:21, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Article is coming along
While my Wikipedia input these days is very sporadic, I do check this article from time to time, for reasons which would be obvious after reading the above comments. That is, various edits - especially some anonymous ones - have not always improved the article, and some have quietly chipped away at its integrity.

But the editing contributions since my last input appear constructive, including by some anonymous editors. Good to see also the addition of a picture. And thanks to those who picked up my own spelling errors. The "per cent" bit in the Gordon quote I think you'll find was verbatim, not a typo on my part.

On developing the article, I do think the underlying argument of the messageboxes atop the article have some merit. I would continue to argue that to develop the article, the most important thing is not to stuff around too much with the existing text. Check reliable and verifiable resources on Liston, and add material. If you simply add material, you then have something more substantial to sculpt the article with. I can think of one article to which I contributed, which looks substantially different now, compared to when it first began. And that was purely a result of sufficient material being added to be able to 'sculpt' the article via layout and spreading material into appropriate sections etc. Finding useable material can be a slow process. There is a lot of stuff out there in internet land, much of which is sheer crap, but amongst which is to be found genuinely useful information. My stance on referencing gives some idea of how I differentiate crap from non-crap: if a reference has any substance, it should be possible to physically track it down.

This is especially the case for historical information. Anything we know of past historical characters comprises physical documents and artifacts, not internet blog conjecture etc. So by definition, such material must be sourceable. And the reference itself should give sufficient information such that a dedicated researcher could track it down and lay his or her hands on the item. Most people don't. Even I don't, although I have: some years ago I wrote around the world and physically obtained several out-of-print books because I reasoned that if they exist, they are findable, and the limit is the amount of effort one is prepared to expend, not the findability. I proved this to myself to a ridiculouse extent, resulting in a ridiculously large library (comprising old and contemporary works covering a large range of subjects) which is now almost completely culled. I do not advocate this as a sensible or even laudable thing to do. I only note it by way of indicating that there is some experiential basis to some of my comments here and there on the finding of good information. It can be done.

One thing you'll see I tried to do was insert wording to indicate that the world in which Liston and his contemporaries lived was quite different to the world in which we find modern medicine. This is no idle issue. In various university disciplines, especially say, anthropology, but also history etc., the point is continually made that we should be careful not to extrapolate from our current socio-historical context to previous ones. Something that seems ludicrous or barbaric now, may have in fact been bold cutting-edge stuff in its day. I would argue that it's important that the article's text reflects this, because it is the context of the era in which Liston lived that makes much of his contribution significant. To improve the wording I've used, all you have to do is find material from pretty much any decent medical history source, and quote or paraphrase it.

I commend the constructive efforts to this article, and wish contributing editors good luck. I hope some contributors are Scots, or people with Scottish ancestry - you'll be more likely to guard and build rather than damage the article, than those for whom Scottish history has no meaning. If the article has a unique flavour to it, either now or after substantial development, this is not necessarily a problem. Liston was a unique character. Scots are often unique characters. Probably the main thing is to keep information integrity, which is best done by adding material, then sculpting to read appropriately without losing information. Wotnow (talk) 21:06, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 04:38, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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Liston's most famous case -- Did it really happen?
The article quotes Richard Gordon about "Liston's four most famous cases". I think the 4th (scrotal tumor) and 3rd (boy with aneurysm) are attested elsewhere. The 1st most famouse case is the surgery with a 300% mortality rate, and it's easy to find lots of articles on the web that describes them too. But I couldn't find anyone who cites any historical sources, and more sober academic papers about Liston do not mention it. Gordon's book cites two sources for the chapter on Liston:

 C.W. Cock, The first operation under ether in Europe; the story of three days P. Fleming. "Robert Liston", the first professor of clinical surgery at UCH". University College Hospital Magazine, 1926. 1:176-85. 

Cock is available on the Internet Archive, but doesn't contain the 300% story. I could not find Fleming online.

It seems possible that the 300% story was made up later and didn't actually happen? It would be good to check in the article by Fleming, but think the wikipedia article should maybe take a more skeptical stance. Vilhelm.s (talk) 19:01, 27 January 2018 (UTC)


 * I've managed to get a hold of the Fleming article. It does not mention the 300% story. Gordon seemed to have made it up or gotten it from an unknown source. However, I'm concerned that this would be considered independent research. Are there any Wikipedia experts who can advise us how to proceed? 129.59.47.132 (talk) 04:16, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
 * It is always hard to use a source to say something didn't happen; I snipped out the parts of the article that refer to the incident as if it is established fact. Someone already included a source to say it might be apocryphal, so I used that and a podcast episode (not ideal) focusing on debunking the myth as a source to say there is no primary source evidence of these claims.  PrismaCosmos (talk) 19:37, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Multiple Issues
The article relies very heavily on Richard Gordon's "Great Medical Disasters", to the point that some other citations use Gordon as their source. This book was a comedy book, and thus many parts of this article copy his non-clinical and unprofessional style. More crucially, Gordon uses few sources for his own book, leaving myself to conclude Gordon fabricated many facts and events of Liston's life, especially the "300% fatality rate surgery". The article greatly needs to be rewritten using more factual sources, especially those preceding the publication of Gordon's book in 1983.Edfan32 (talk) 03:15, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Cause of death?
The Mental Floss reference says he died in a sailing accident, but here we say he died of an aneurysm. Anyone know for sure? --Rpresser 05:40, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

WHAT A CHAD
i want a disney film about him 50.221.172.174 (talk) 04:44, 17 October 2022 (UTC)