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Graduation

Lister graduated with Bachelor of Medicine with honours, in the autumn of 1852. During his final year, Lister won several prestigious awards, that were heavily contested among the student body of the London teaching hospitals. He won the Longridge Prize

For the greatest proficiency evinced during the three years immediately preceding, on the Sessional Examinations for Honours in the classes of the Faculty of Medicine of the College; and for creditable performance of duties of offices at the Hospital

that included a £40 stipend. He was also awarded a gold medal in Structural and Physiological Botany. Lister obtained two of the four available gold medals in Anatomy and Physiology as well as surgery, which came with a medal scholarship of £50 a year, for two years, for his second examination in medicine. In the same year, Lister passed the examination for the fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, bringing to a close nine years of education.

With his medical education completed, Sharpey advised Lister to spend a month at the medical practice of his lifelong friend James Syme in Edinburgh and then visit medical schools in Europe for a longer period for training. Sharpey himself had been taught first in Edinburgh and later in Paris. Sharpey had met Syme, a teacher of clinical surgery, who was widely considered the best surgeon in the United Kingdom while he was in Paris. Sharpey had gone north to Edinburgh in 1818, along with many other surgeons since, due to the influence of John Hunter. Hunter had taught Edward Jenner who is seen as the first surgeon to take a scientific approach to the study of medicine, that was known as the Hunterian method Hunter was an early advocate for careful investigation and experimentation, using the techniques of pathology and physiology to give himself a better understanding of healing than many of his colleagues. For example, his 1794 paper, A treatise on the blood, inflammation and gun-shot wounds was the first systematic study of swelling, discovering that inflammation was common to all diseases. Due to Hunter, surgery was raised from a job then practised by hobbyists or amateurs into a true scientific profession. As the Scottish universities taught medicine and surgery from a scientific viewpoint, surgeons who wished to emulate those techniques travelled north for training. Scottish universities had several other features that distinguished them from the medical universities in the south. They were inexpensive and did not require religious admissions tests, attracting the most scientifically progressive students in Britain. The most important differentiator, was that medical schools in Scotland had evolved from a scholarly tradition, where English medical schools relied on hospitals and practice. Experimental science had no practitioners at English medical schools and while Edinburgh University medical school was large and active at the time, southern medical schools were generally moribund, their laboratory space and teaching materials being inadequate. English medical schools tended to view surgery as manual labour, not a respectable calling for a gentleman academic.