Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted Read Online Free PDF

ways served as a rolemodel for the younger man. They spent a great deal of time together, and their lives became closely intertwined.
    With his interest focusing on anatomy and surgery, Halsted seized every opportunity for dissection, spending many hours at the table. Having access to adequate finances, he bought extra cadavers, which he dissected and studied well beyond the level required of students.
    At the completion of his second year, the hard work and extracurricular activities were finally getting the better of him. Exhausted, he retired to Block Island, one of the rugged and isolated dots of terminal moraine off the coast of Rhode Island. There he spent the summer of 1876 recuperating.
    Reinvigorated by sailing and fresh air, Halsted soon returned to his studies in the evenings and decided to prepare for the examination for an intern position at Bellevue Hospital in New York. The possibility excited him, but the rules for internship at Bellevue had just changed, and interns were now required to have already earned an MD degree. Despite this new requirement, Halsted decided to pursue the opportunity, and though he had some difficulty convincing his professors to allow him to sit for the examination, his dogged persistence won out.
    “I had little expectation of being admitted to Bellevue for I was ineligible, not having a medical degree, nor had I taken the cram quiz,” Halsted wrote. Tanned and fit from his summer in the sun, “I recall contrasting my physical condition with that of the other fellows who presented themselves for this examination. Most of them were pale and nervous having remained in town all summer for the cram Quizzes.” He took the exam “as something of a lark,” knowing that if he failed he could take it again in the spring. To everyone’s surprise, he placed fifth, and though technically unqualified, he was offered the position, which he happily accepted. Halsted later said that the good news had resulted in one of the few sleepless nights of his life, which he spent contemplating the boundless opportunities of his future.
    The internship at Bellevue began on October 1, 1876. Halsted was assigned to the fourth surgical division, although he “would have preferred the second surgical, on which Thomas A. Sabine was visiting surgeon.” Sabine and Stephen Smith were among the few surgeons in New York who enthusiastically embraced Lister’s antiseptic surgery. Halsted was convinced of the importance of the concept, if not of Lister’s specific techniques, and working with believers was where he wanted to be. But the coveted position with Sabine went to Halsted’s friend Samuel Van der Poel. One year ahead of Halsted at P&S, Van der Poel had done poorly in his first attempt at the Bellevue exam the previous year, but after intensive coaching by Halsted, he performed better than his tutor and won the prized position. The two young men were off to Bellevue.
    The senior surgeons at Bellevue were a mixed lot. Halsted studied with many of the great ones, but he also encountered many who “left everything to the interns.” His immediate superiors, led by famed Civil War surgeon Dr. Frank Hamilton, did not subscribe to Lister’s antiseptic techniques, but they were open-minded enough to allow interns to adopt the new method. Those interns who did so noted a significant reduction in postoperative infection, but their findings had no effect on hospital policy.
    Hamilton was one of the stars of Halsted’s Bellevue experience. An army surgeon who had commanded the field hospital at the first battle of Bull Run, Hamilton cut a dashing figure in riding boots and spurs, arriving dramatically each day on a large, iron-gray charger. An expert in skin grafting, his primary interest was treating fractures, about which he had written a textbook. Surgical intervention to treat disease was not yet a reality and was limited to attempting to stem the damage of traumatic injury, and trauma meant fractures. Not