WILLIAM STEWART HALSTED. 601 



the principle of nerve blocking, and was accustomed to demonstrate 

 to dentists how painless extractions or even more extensive operations 

 on the jaws might thus be carried out. He was the first, also, at this 

 time, to demonstrate spinal anaesthesia by introducing the drug into 

 the lumbar meninges. In the course of these studies he used himself 

 as a subject, injecting his own peripheral nerves in order to map out 

 the areas of anrethesia, and, unaware of the danger he was running, 

 contracted an habituation to the drug, from which, with the help of a 

 devoted professional friend, he effectually broke himself. 



It was natural enough that cocaine was subsequently abhorred by 

 him, and after Schleich's solution came to be generally employed as a 

 local anaesthetic, he usually preferred to infiltrate with salt solution 

 alone, which has certain anaesthetizing properties, rather than use 

 even the diluted drug. Fifteen years later when the writer of this 

 note, as Dr. Halsted's resident surgeon, stumbled anew upon the 

 principle of nerve blocking for operations on hernia and published a 

 paper on the subject, he was utterly unaware that his chief had ever 

 made studies with cocaine of any sort, so reticent was he about this 

 particular matter and so little did questions of priority interest him. 

 It has remained for the dentists to call attention to his original work 

 on regional anaesthesia, and a few months before his death they made 

 due public acknowledgment of what Dr. Halsted himself had never 

 laid claim to, and the knowledge of which he had even withheld, at 

 least until recent years, from his house officers. 



Before this tragic episode interrupted what would doubtless have 

 been a brilliant career in New York, he had published a number of 

 papers which showed promise of his technical gifts and abilities as an 

 investigator, but it was not until he was brought to Baltimore in the 

 late eighties by William H. Welch and got to work in the original 

 pathological building there with Franklin P. Mall, Councilman, Flex- 

 ner and others, that his unusual capacity for research was shown at its 

 full worth. 



The studies of compensatory thyroid hypertrophy, one of his early 

 researches, published in the first volume of the Johns Hopkins Hospital 

 Reports, remained for twenty years the basis of our views regarding 

 exophthalmic goitre as an expression of functional overactivity. The 

 correctness of his observations and interpretation of them, indeed, 

 remained unquestioned until he himself repeated the experiments and, 



