Doctor does drugs, gains fame: William S. Halsted
"Cocaine," "addict" and "doctor" are not words that go well together. But somehow William Stewart Halsted was able to overcome decades of dependence on coke and morphine to become a giant in medicine -- one of the "Big Four" who made Johns Hopkins a world-class hospital and med school. “Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted” examines the life of Hopkins’ first chief of surgery, and The Baltimore Sun has taken a look at the book and author Dr. Gerald Imber. Here's an excerpt from Michael Sragow's article:
Alongside doctors William Henry Welch, Howard A. Kelly and William Osler, Halsted became one of the Hopkins “Big Four” — a group that revolutionized hospital and medical school standards and protocols, turning Baltimore into a center of medical progress. Halsted was personally responsible for innovations in many critical procedures, including hernia repair and radical mastectomy.
He still spent prolonged, solitary vacations in Europe relieving his hunger for cocaine. But in Welch he found a loyal protector and confidant. “The pattern was established,” Imber writes. “Halsted isolated and far from home, indulging his habit, confessing to Welch, and then dosing himself with morphine and resuming life as usual in Baltimore.” ...
For Imber, the real story “was that Halsted operated at a time when all these things that I took for granted as a surgeon 50 years later didn’t exist. It was inconceivable to me that before Halsted no one had ever removed a gall stone, or that surgeons weren’t using routinely wearing gloves. It was hard to believe that sterility in the operating room was an issue right into the 20th century.”
According to Imber, Halsted was part of the medical avant-garde inside and out of the operating room. He instituted a structured surgical residency and developed the science of experimental surgery. “Before Halsted, someone would think of an operation, try it in the operating room, and if the patient lived, do it again and if a couple of patients died, do something else. He insisted everything be done scientifically, in the dog lab, proven with animals, before it had any place in the operating room. That is a phenomenal leap from trial and error to science.”
