This is the Physician and Surgeon's Alamanac for September 23, 2009.
Today is the birthday of Dr. William Stewart Halsted, born on this day in 1852 in New York City.
Halsted is considered to be one of the most influential surgeons in American history.
In 1862 he was one of the first doctors to perform a cholecystectomy when he removed his own mother's gallbladder.
He was also was one of the first physicians to experiment with cocaine, first as an anesthetic then as a recreational drug. He was sent to Butler Sanatorium in Providence, Rhode Island in 1862 where he was successfully detoxed from cocaine by replacing it with an addiction to heroine. He was a heroine user during his time at Johns Hopkins until his death in 1922. He died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage and post-operative pneumonia following gallbladder surgery in which Halsted's own technique in closing the bile duct was used.
Halsted' roommate at Yale was Samuel Clarke Bushnell (1852 - 1928). Samuel Clarke Bushnell, a famous American clergyman who's said:
"I come from good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where Cabots speak only to Lowells,
And the Lowells speak only to God."