https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-to-adapt-to-tech-were-heading-into-the-shadows/

The way we tell it, surgery was butchery before Joseph Lister. In 1872, two out of every five compound fracture victims treated by surgeons in Germany subsequently died from infection. At the country’s best hospital in Munich, 80 percent of all wounds were infected by hospital gangrene. “Horrible was our trade!” a surgeon later declared. Everyone was desperate for a solution.

Then Lister invented antisepsis—a technique involving carbolic acid that stopped surgical patients from getting life-threatening infections. Millions of lives were saved as a result, and Lister is now heralded as the father of modern surgery. But getting there—refining and scaling this technique to hospitals around the western world—meant that he and many other doctors broke with convention. Mostly, this meant doing unusual, unconventional, or provocative things—in a grey area between right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, ethical and unethical. Occasionally it went dark: They broke their oaths, hid data, and killed people.