SCIENCE 



[Vol. LVI, No. 1452 



Lis senior year was captain of one of the early 

 university football teams. Like many other 

 young men his ambition was not fired until 

 his entrance into a professional school, and 

 when, after his graduation in 1874, he entered 

 the College of Physicians and Surgeons 

 (Columbia) in New York, he srttled down to 

 prove his mettle with the result that three 

 years later, on getting his degree, he was 

 awarded a prize for leading his class in scholar- 

 ship. After serving as interne at Bellevue he 

 was appointed house physician to the newly 

 erected New York Hospital. Subsequently, 

 two years were passed in Europe where he 

 devoted himself more especially to the sub- 

 jects of anatomy and embryology. He studied 

 at Vienna, Leipzig and Wiirtzburg, and his 

 later surgical trend and investigative proclivi- 

 ties were distinctly colored by the German and 

 Austrian surgery of the day. 



On his return from abroad in 1880, he was 

 made assistant demonstrator and subsequently 

 demonstrator of anatomy at the College of 

 Physicians and Surgeons. He also held a 

 number of hospital positions, first at the Chari- 

 ty Hospital where from 1881 to 1887 he was 

 an attending siu-geon and director of the 

 out-patient department. For three years he 

 was also surgeon-in-chief to the Emigrant Hos- 

 pital, Ward's Island; and later, from 1885 to 

 1887, an attending surgeon to both the Belle- 

 vue and Presbyterian Hospitals. Dui-ing this 

 period in New York, following his return from 

 abroad, he supported himself mainly by teach- 

 ing, and with Dr. George E. Munroe he or- 

 ganized a famous extramural coui-se for stu- 

 dents, consisting of practical exercises in the 

 laboratory and at the bedside, to take the place 

 of the time-honored quizzes which it was long 

 the fashion for the New York students with 

 hospital aspirations to attend. 



During his last few years in New York he 

 undertook an anatomico-surgical investigation 

 on the anesthetizing effect of the then little- 

 known and newly introduced drug, cocaine. In 

 this research, which had been begun in 1885, 

 he was the fii'st to utilize for surgical pur- 

 poses 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 anasthesia 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, con- 

 tracted 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 sub- 

 sequently abhorred by him, and after Schleich's 

 solution came to be generally employed as a 

 local anesthetic, he usually preferred to in- 

 filtrate with salt solution alone, which has cer- 

 tain 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 prin- 

 ciple 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 re- 

 ticent was he about this particular matter and 

 so little did questions of priority interest him. 

 It has remained for the dentists to call atten- 

 tion to his original work on regional anaesthesia, 

 and a few months before his death they made 

 due public acknowledgment of what Dr. Hal- 

 sted 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 thyi-oid hyper- 

 trophy, one of his early researches, published 

 in the first volume of the Johns Hopkins Hos- 

 pital Repor<ts, remained for twenty years the 



