William S. Halsted

William Stewart Halsted was born September 23, 1852 in New York City. He received his AB from Yale University in 1974 and his MD from Columbia in New York in 1877. After two years of medical school, Halstead left, feeling burned out, and spent time on Block Island, RI. 

He took a competitive exam to become an intern at Bellevue hospital and became a House Physician there. It was at Bellevue that Dr. Halsted became acquainted with the antiseptic techniques originally used by Joseph Lister, and incorporated them into his surgeries. 

Halsted went to Europe to study medicine for several years, after having exhausted all the US had to offer. He returned to NY in 1880 and for the next six years lived an extraordinarily vigorous life, operating on patients, teaching medical students, performing gall-bladder surgery on his mother, and giving his own blood in a blood transfusion with his sister. 

In 1884, Halsted read an article that would change his life. An Austrian ophthalmologist had written about the anesthetic properties of cocaine applied to the eye, and he and his students and fellow physician experimented on each other. They demonstrated that cocaine could produce safe and effective anesthesia when applied topically and when injected. Halsted would inject himself with the drug to test it before using it on patients. Of course, Halsted and some of his fellow physicians became addicted.

Halsted's addiction to cocaine ended his medical career in New York City.

When Johns Hopkins University Hospital opened in May 1889, Halsted became Head of the Outpatient Department, Acting Surgeon to the Hospital, and Associate Professor of Surgery, after being recommended by Welch when the first choice for the position fell through. These lesser positions alluded to the fact that the administration was still worried about Halsted's past cocaine addiction. In 1890, he was appointed Surgeon-in-Chief of the hospital.

The years Halsted spent in Baltimore are referred to as the Baltimore Period, and lasted from 1889 until his death in 1922. It was a time of great productivity for him. 

His contributions to surgery were numerous and various. He was credited with starting the first formal surgical residency training program in the United States at Johns Hopkins. He based this mainly on the ideas that he obtained in Europe, especially those of the Germans, Austrians, and Swiss. This was the foundation for the residency training programs in place today. 

He introduced the use of local anesthetics, he was the first to put on rubber gloves, and he devised many new and ingenious operations. The use of rubber gloves came about because his main nurse, who would later become his wife, found that her hands broke out in a rash after using the harsh chemicals used to sterilize operating room equipment. Dr. Halsted contacted Goodyear Rubber Company and had them make rubber gloves for her. After a while, everyone in his operating room wore them, and the rate of infection decreased significantly.

In so many accounts, Halsted is referred to as a very sharp dresser, with his shoes being hand-made in London and his shirts in Paris. There is even mention of his shirts being sent back to Paris to be laundered, but that was probably how he sourced the morphine to which he was now addicted. Laundered shirts would not attract any attention at the customs desk. 

Despite all of the negative factors surrounding Dr. Halsted, he was a brilliant surgeon, and his students, especially those he liked, also became stellar surgeons. He was elected President of the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty in 1918 and served for the standard term of one year. 

In 1919, he recovered from an operation to remove gallstones. He failed to recover from a second gallstone operation, however, and died in 1922. His surgeries were carried out by his friends, including Dr. J.M.T. Finney and others. 

Dr. Halsted is buried in North Carolina where he kept a second house for years.