There was once a surgeon who conducted a surgery with a 300% mortality rate. Robert Liston was a 19th century Scottish surgeon and wasn’t a bad surgeon for the standards at the time. He would only lose one in six patients compared to the usual one in four.
Liston was renowned for his speed during operations, this fact being important prior to the development of anaesthesia, a field in which Liston would go on to pioneer. Listen was known to be able to amputate a leg and dress the wound in two and a half minutes. In one case he was so fast he accidently slice off the testicle of one of his patients.
Working at such speed Liston became quiet the showman, often calling on onlookers to time him. Despite his talent it was his speed that caused him to botch one operation in remarkable fashion.
While amputating a patients leg Liston brought the knife down so fast through the patient he accidently chopped off the fingers of his assistant who was holding the leg steady for him. While withdrawing the knife quickly he sliced the coattails of a man standing next to him. The bystander believing himself to be wounded fainted. In the aftermath of the surgery both the patient and the assistant died from infection, possibly gangrene or sepsis. It also turned out that the bystander who fainted actually had a heart attack and died. So an operation on one man led to the death of three men, making it probably the deadliest operation in history.
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