9 Inventors Who Were Killed By Their Creations

Okay, this one is not strictly an invention, neither did it kill its inventor, but Robert Liston's skills as a surgeon proved to be so disastrous and deadly that it deserves a mention.

Famous as "the fastest knife in the West End", Robert Liston was able to amputate a leg in under tow and a half minutes. This was a crucial skill in the early 1800s as anaesthetics hadn't yet been brought into the operating theatre. In those days, surgery was so excruciatingly painful that you either had to get your patient blind drunk, drop them insensible with a blow to the head or just get the whole thing over and done with as quickly as possible.

Robert Liston's most famous case was a leg amputation with ruinous consequences. He performed the operation with his trademark speed, but in his haste he also managed to slice off his assistant's fingers as well as the patient's leg. Both died of hospital gangrene in the days following. 

Liston also slashed the coat tails of a spectator who promptly died of shock as he thought his vital artery had been cut. Resulting in the only operation to ever have had a 300% mortality rate.

Unfortunately, "faster" did not always mean "better" as at other times, Liston is reported to have inadvertently cut off a man's testicles during an overly-enthusiastic leg amputation and accidentally slashed a young boy's carotid artery after mistaking an aneurysm for an abscess. We would probably rather that he just take his time to be honest.