WILLIAM STEWART HALSTED. 603 



of these cases, and the same might be said of his hernia operation, 

 though in this he shared the honors with Bassini, an Italian, who intro- 

 duced a high inguinal operation with repair of the canal at about the 

 same time. In the late nineties his attention was chiefly centered 

 upon the diseases of the gall-bladder and its ducts, and the early radical 

 operation on the common duct emanated from his clinic. Possibly 

 few men in the country knew more than did he about the condition 

 from which he was destined to succumb — a stone in the ampulla of 

 Vater. 



In later years he devoted himself chiefly to studies relating to the 

 blood-vessels and evolved a method whereby in cases of aneurysm the 

 major trunks could be slowly constricted, and in this as in all other 

 subjects which his studies illuminated, his inventive genius was dis- 

 played, as well as his thorough knowledge of anatomy and pathology. 

 He was the first successfully to ligate the left subclavian artery in its 

 first portion for aneurysm and the only surgeon who is recorded to 

 have performed this rare procedure twice. 



Halsted's honors were many. In 1900 at the centennary of the 

 Royal College of Surgeons of England he, with J. C. Warren of Boston, 

 W. W. Keen of Philadelphia, and Robert F. Weir of New York, were 

 the four Americans chosen to receive an honorary fellowship. A 

 few years later he was made an F. R. C. S. of Edinburgh, and also an 

 LL.D. both of Edinburgh and of his alma mater, Yale. Columbia 

 gave him a D.Sc. and he was a member of the National Academy of 

 Sciences as well as of many other foreign and American scientific 

 bodies. Though his publications were comparatively few — rarely 

 more than one or two a year — he wrote well and painstakingly, and 

 many of his papers will remain among our surgical classics. The one 

 surgeon he perhaps admired more than any other was the late Theodore 

 Kocher of Berne, Switzerland, and the two men, in manner and 

 methods surgical, in imagination and ideals, had very much in com- 

 mon. Both of them held their professorships for an unusual number of 

 years — Kocher for forty -five years, Halsted for thirty-three. 



Halsted was a man who taught by example rather than precept. 

 He was a safe, fastidious and finished surgeon, by no means a brilliant 

 and showy operator after the style cultivated by many of his contempo- 

 raries. He cared nothing for administration, and up to ten years ago 

 at least, his staff never met as a bod v. He was not a successful 



