Halsted, William (1852–1922), surgeon.After graduation from medical school at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in
New York City, William Stewart Halsted spent two years studying at the Germanic clinics of central Europe. Returning to New York in 1880, he practiced
surgery at several hospitals while conducting a series of research studies. Experiments with the recently discovered local anesthetic effects of cocaine resulted in Halsted's becoming addicted to that drug in 1885. Following a long period of recovery, he was invited in 1888 to do laboratory research at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore under the sponsorship and oversight of William H.
Welch, the professor of pathology. Halsted's work so impressed leading members of the faculty that he was appointed surgeon‐in‐chief to the Johns Hopkins Hospital and professor of surgery at the medical school, which opened in 1893.
During Halsted's thirty‐year tenure in these positions, he founded a distinctive school of surgery, characterized by emphasis on the physiological basis of disease and therapy, laboratory and clinic research, and meticulous operative technique, all of which were marked advances over previous practices. A number of the men who completed Halsted's rigorous training established departments of their own at other universities, thus spreading his teachings throughout the academic community. He also devised the residency framework upon which modern surgical training is based, and made important contributions to the operative treatment of breast
cancer, thyroid disease, and inguinal hernia. By the time of his death, the methodology that is still called Halstedian had become the predominant style in American surgical teaching and clinical work. It is for this reason that William Halsted has been called “The Father of American Surgery.”
See also
Hospitals;
Medical Education;
Medicine: From the 1870s to 1945.
Bibliography
Samuel J. Crowe , Halsted of Johns Hopkins, 1957.
Sherwin B. Nuland , Medical Science Comes to America: William Stewart Halsted of Johns Hopkins, in Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, pp. 386–421, 1988.
Sherwin B. Nuland
