William Stewart Halstedwas an American surgeon, who pioneered many methods of preventing surgical infection and introduced the use of general anesthesia.
Background
William S. Halsted was born on 23 September 1852 in New York City. Halsted's father was the president of a textile-importing firm, Halsted, Haines and Co. , and his mother came from the family of Richard Townley Haines, her husband's partner.
Education
William S. Halsted graduated in 1869 Yale University. Following his graduation from Yale in 1874, he enrolled in the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City.
Career
William S. Halsted served an internship at Bellevue Hospital. He retained these posts for the rest of his life. While still a student, Halsted developed his continuing interest in anatomical dissection, studies of asepsis and application of experimental methods to clinical problems.
In 1880 and became a surgeon in the United States. Over the course of the next five years, he became visiting surgeon to many New York City hospitals, including Bellevue, Roosevelt, the Charity, Emigrant, Chambers Street, and Presbyterian as needed during his afternoons and oversaw the outpatient program at Roosevelt Hospital each morning. During the evenings, he taught anatomy and conducted medical classes.
Throughout the 1880 Halsted revolutionized surgical medicine in the United States. Halsted began his own experiments in anesthesia. The most readily available anesthetics at the time, however, were cocaine and morphine, and Halsted succumbed to both drugs' highly addictive qualities through his experiments. He discovered, however, that an injection of cocaine into the trunk of a sensory nerve resulted in a numbing of pain in all that nerve's branches. Halsted concluded that a small amount of injected anesthetic could be used to anesthetize a wide portion of the patient's body, thereby introducing general anesthesia to modern medicine.
By 1886, Halsted's morphine and cocaine addictions caused his surgical abilities to become dangerously unreliable, and his medical career was nearly destroyed by the time he was forced to leave New York City.
Halsted reentered the medical profession by working in Welch's laboratory around which was built Johns Hopkins Hospital. His initial term was for one year, due to the hospital's concerns about Halsted's diminished capabilities from drug addiction. His exemplary performance resulted in a permanent appointment the following year. His operation for breast cancer was originally reported at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1891, later reports described complete removal of the organ together with auxiliary lymphatic glands.
As professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, Halsted instructed many students who would graduate to medical prominence, including Hugh Young, John M. T. Finney, and neurosurgery pioneers Harvey Cushing and Walter Dandy.
He contributed to new procedures in intestinal sutures and treatment of tuberculosis, hernias of the groin, goiters, radical mastectomys for breast cancer, and circulatory problems, including aneurysms and surgery on blood vessels.
He is admired also for establishing new procedures for training medical students, requiring that students study physiology and anatomy.
Also Halsted drafted the Goodyear Rubber Company to produce surgical gloves to protect his staff.
His views were expressed in the article "The Training of the Surgeon, " which was reprinted in the Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin in 1904.
Halsted is credited also with changing the approach of modern medicine from its previously unrefined reputation to a more calculated manner that emphasized controlled blood loss and minimized tissue damage, which also marked his emphasis on physiological and anatomical knowledge.
He was considered to be a slow and methodical surgeon, careful to not disrupt any area of the patient's body that was in close proximity to the operated area. For the remainder of his life, Halsted traveled extensively throughout the medical capitals of Europe, visiting clinics in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
His research and teaching made him an invaluable asset to Johns Hopkins, and he helped establish the institution as among the United States's most respected centers of medical research and knowledge.
In 1919, he recovered from an operation to remove gallstones.
His medical writings, entitled Surgical Papers in Two Volumes, were published in 1924 and reprinted in 1961.
Despite his lifelong concern with biliary tract surgery - at the age of 32 he had relieved his own dangerously ill mother by drainage of an infected gall bladder - Halsted died as a result of an obstructed biliary duct on Sept. 7, 1922.
Though Halsted was raised a Presbyterian, he was an agnostic by adulthood.
Views
Quotations:
"After checking the hemorrhage, I transfused my sister with blood drawn into a syringe from one of my veins and injected immediately into hers".
Connections
In 1890, Halsted married Caroline Hampton, the niece of Wade Hampton III, a former general in the Confederate States Army and also a former Governor of South Carolina. They purchased the High Hampton mountain retreat in North Carolina from Caroline's three aunts. There, Halsted raised dahlias and pursued his hobby of astronomy; he and his wife had no children.