By the 1890s, the Professor, with dozens of residents in the wings, was
overseeing a vast surgical empire. For only a few cognoscenti, Halsted’s
travails with cocaine and morphine addiction were known. He would
disappear every summer for months, leaving assistant surgeons and
surgical residents in charge of the most sophisticated hospital in the world.
His absence was ideal training ground for a life of surgery, at times the
loneliest profession.
In the 20th century, there were a small number of hospitals in America
that had become surgical meccas, including Johns Hopkins and the Mayo
Clinic. Medicine and surgery, under the leadership of German thinkers and
refined under American devotees, was no longer dependent upon
divination and sorcery. Medical education reform, by way of the Flexner
report of 1910, had revolutionized the way medical schools operated, and
had resulted in the closure of half of American medical schools by 1920.
Flimflam no longer tolerated, only schools with true academic missions
would be accredited, facilitating the transfer of the mantle of leadership of
surgery from Europe to America. This handover was complete with the
cataclysms of the world wars.
Halsted passed in 1922 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Days shy of his
70th birthday, he died childless, but with numerous professional heirs and
innumerable philosophical debtors. Patients had reason to believe in
medical sciences by the Roaring Twenties, even before the advent of
antibiotics. And a great deal of that confidence is owed to Professor
Halsted. “For the few who knew of his ability to navigate uncharted waters
[drug use] while the siren song rang in his ears, his journey was nothing
short of heroic. If a single person can be considered the father of modern
surgery, the only contender is William Stewart Halsted.”^33