Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted
Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted Books
- ISBN13: 9781607146278
- Shape up: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
A major new biography of the doctor who invented modern surgery. Brilliant, driven, but haunted by demons, William Stewart Halsted took surgery from a horrific, perilous do to what we now know as a lifesaving art.
Halsted was born to wealth and privilege in New York City in the mid-1800s. He attended the finest schools, but he was a mediocre student. His academic interests blossomed at medical school and he quickly became a celebrated general practitioner. Experimenting with cocaine as a local anesthetic, he became addicted. He was hospitalized and treated with morphine to control his craving for cocaine. For the remaining 40 years of his life he was addicted to both drugs.
Halsted resurrected his career at Johns Hopkins, where he became the first chief of surgery. Among his accomplishments, he introduced the residency training system, the use of sterile gloves, the first successful hernia repair, radical mastectomy, fine silk sutures, and anatomically right surgical technique. Halsted is without doubt the father of modern surgery, and his eccentric behavior, unusual lifestyle, and counterintuitive productivity in the face of lifetime addiction make his tale unusually compelling.
Gerald Imber, a celebrated general practitioner himself, evokes Halsted’s extraordinary life and achievements and places them squarely in the historical and social context of the late 19th century. The result is an illuminating biography of a complex and troubled man, whose genius we continue to benefit from today.
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I applaud Dr. Imber’s effort to result in more attention to the very fascinating life of Dr. Halsted, but that this is the former’s doctors first attempt at writing a serious non-fiction book is painfully evident. At a certain top, I became tired of the disjointed sentences and literary cliches, and it made the book very trying to end,. Admittedly, I did not.
Rating: 3 / 5
“Genius on the Edge” is an fascinating book describing the medical developments (especially in surgery) during the period of about 1846 to 1922. The first third of the book mainly focused on what surgery was like before this period, on the developments that occurred from 1846 to 1889, and how they affected Halsted’s medical training and prompted his surgical innovations. The rest of the book was more a run of small biographies of men who worked with Halsted and the developments they (and he) brought to the do of surgery from 1889-1922. It also covered Halsted’s marriage and how he lived.
The author didn’t assume that the reader was familiar with medical terms and so pithily worked that in rank in as was needed to know the innovations. He did an brilliant job of making the topic fascinating and simple to know. I found the book a quick read despite the quantity of in rank packed into it. I also liked how the author wove the general technological changes and social setting into the tale so we may possibly see how society effected the advances and how Halsted and the others influenced society in turn. Even as the book frequently focused on American surgery (especially that done at Johns Hopkins Sickbay and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine), the author also brought up correlated advances over in Europe.
There were only a link of brief descriptions of actual surgery, so most of the book probably wouldn’t bother those who get queasy by descriptions of operations.
Some of the topics covered were: the introduction of general anesthetics, heat sterilization, and antiseptics to make surgery safer. How medical training had been done and how it changed (both in medical school and post-graduate) below the influence of Halsted and his friends at Johns Hopkins. The creation of out-patient clinics, the beginnings of bacteriology and the germ theory, the exchange from quick and brutal surgery to gentle, careful handing during surgery, the introduction of surgical gloves, of using cocaine as a local anesthetic, emergency blood transfusion, surgery of the brain, and much more.
Overall, I’d highly urge this well-written and fascinating book to those interested in how medicine (especially surgery) has developed into what we take for contracted today.
I received this book as a review copy from the publisher.
Reviewed by Debbie of Different Time, Different Place book reviews
(differenttimedifferentplace. blogspot. com)
Rating: 5 / 5
Genius on the Edge by Dr. Gerald Imber MD
Kaplan Publishing
Title of the Review: Genius Recognized
Reviewed by: Dr. Joseph S. Maresca CPA, CISA
The author, Dr. Gerald Imber, MD does an brilliant job of
documenting the life and times of Dr. William S. Halsted MD.
Dr. William Stewart Halsted was educated in New York initially.
He attended Yale and the College of Physicians and Surgeons
at 23rd St. and 4th Av. in NYC.
Scholastically, he graduated in the top 10 of his class
and won $100 in an essay contest for the description of
the arteries of the neck. He worked at
New York Sickbay and read extensive surgical
scholarship written in Europe. He held positions at
Blackwell’s Island and Emigrant Sickbay, although the
workload was staggering .
At an early age, he started to know the intricacies
of blood group incompatibility. He found that intestinal
anastomosis using fine silk sutures incorporating the submucosal
layer withstood the pressures of normal bodily functions.
He demonstrated this aspect graphically.
By 1889, rubber sterile gloves were introduced to protect
the skin from irritation. Halsted perfected radical surgery
with extensive fine suturing for breast cancer.
He reconstructed hernia defects in the groin by using muscle
and tough fascial sheath of the oblique muscles of the lower
abdomen to reconstruct the inguinal canal floor. Halsted sutured
the muscles and fascia to Poupart’s ligament, an anatomical
inguinal ligament that traverses the iliac bone of the pubis.
Strong silk sutures were used to tighten the internal abdominal
ring as well. These suturing techniques may possibly have vital
application for the repair of dropped bladders, major surgical
intestinal resections, downsizing mega-intestines (over 27 feet )
and complications from radical hysterectomies.
He perfected hernia repair and found that silver (Ag) had
antiseptic qualities as well.
On April 4, 1892, Halsted was made a Professor of Surgery,
although he had no formal institution to do the art
at the time. By 1900, he perfected two gold standard operations,
placed surgeons’ hands in sterile gloves and commenced a
training system for 3 generations of the most influential
surgeons in the USA.
Today, some of Dr. Halsted’s techniques may possibly be enshrined
in modern artificial intelligence and “Advice-Giving” systems
and processes on knowledge databases.
Cushing was the most impressive of a group of 17 Halsted
residents. He was the first to use anesthesia in hernia
repair, the first to operate on the pituitary gland ;and,
the first to routinely open the skull to
decompress the brain and develop neurological surgical
prototypes.
Halsted performed the first successful excision of an
aneurysm of a major blood vessel. He passed on from
lobar pneumonia on 9-7- 1922.
The work is a classic covering the slow but steady
evolution of basic surgery in the late 19th century and early
20th century. The presentation would make brilliant
reading for a wide constituency of journalists, historians,
physicians and academicians the world over .
Dr. Joseph S. Maresca CPA, CISA
Rating: 5 / 5
Dr. Gerald Imber will exchange your views of what it means to be a doctor and a patient, to be sick and to be well. Even as tracing the intricate evolution of modern surgery, Imber also chronicles the prodigious, twisted career of the greatest general practitioner in American history. As he modernized medicine – introducing such life-sparing novelties as anesthesia, scrubsuits, handwashing, sterlized instruments, even even as the medical establishment strenuously resisted his innovations — Halsted himself descended into a dark, secretive abyss of cocaine abuse and closeted homosexuality. Yet Halsted’s techniques and his teaching were so unimpeachably sound, they remain the develop for involved and teaching surgery today. Halsted’s tale is written with such clarity, it will fascinate universally – by the side of the way, Imber’s tale encompasses, among other matters, 19th-century American and European history, and some commendably high and lamentably low examples of the human shape up. It is a wonder Halsted never had a biography before; we should be very grateful that Dr. Gerald Imber took on this daunting task. His impressive scholarship never gets in the way of excellent tale telling. The charm, humor, and authority of the author’s voice shines warmly throughout the sprawling narrative.
Rating: 5 / 5