![]() For the next 30 years, Welch and his other powerful faculty friends put up with his eccentricities, long unexplained absences, and total lack of interest in teaching students other than the best of his residents.īoth in personality and surgical style, Halsted had undergone a striking metamorphosis. Initially confined to research, Halsted proved himself sufficiently within two years to be named chief of surgery. The brilliant young surgeon was compelled by his illness to give up his peripatetic New York life and relocate to Baltimore at the invitation of his friend who would become the first dean of Johns Hopkins, William Welch, with whom he lived for several years and became completely absorbed by a contemplative, research-based life. Hospitalizing himself for detoxification, he accomplished only a switch from cocaine to morphine. In discovering (through self-experimentation) that cocaine produced local anesthesia, Halsted became addicted. The gregarious young man and a friend shared a well-appointed house, at which they frequently entertained young professional men. After brief training in New York hospitals and two years visiting European clinics, he became one of New York’s most successful surgeons - fast, innovative, and bold. Imber focuses on Halsted’s personal life, which is the stuff of legend: the greatness achieved by this drug-craving Jekyll and Hyde, his unexplained disappearances, his probable closeted homosexuality.īorn of a wealthy New York family in 1852, Halsted was educated at Yale and Columbia’s medical school. Imber, himself a surgeon, has outlined with insight, the unlikely coincidence that was the source of Halsted’s magic: his rehabilitation from serious illness at Johns Hopkins just as this unique institution opened and his lifelong narcotic addiction. The author acknowledges it was not intended to be the definitive biography of America’s greatest surgeon but rather to tell of his life. ![]() This biography is the first of William Stewart Halsted in a half century. ![]()
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February 2023
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