Read Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted for Free Online Page A

friends, including his P&S chum Samuel Van der Poel, who had been studying in Germany. The two young doctors planned to travel and study together for the next several months.
    The trip got off to a bad start, and they aborted their stay in Paris after only a few days. The New York friends hosting them were anything but serious, intent only on squiring them to local hot spots. After a night in Montmartre, and too many bars and cafés, the new arrivals were already worn down. They had little interest in nightlife, and promptly packed up and left for Vienna.
    Arriving by train on November 4, the two young men threw themselves into their studies. The first task was to become fluent in German. Halsted was capable enough in the scientific German needed for medical reading, but the living language was another matter. He engaged two tutors, took German lessons early and late in the day, and in between studied pathology; diseases of the eye, ear, and skin; and gynecology. His German was soon passable, and he took every opportunity to speak it instead of English whenever he could.
    Still interested in anatomy, he studied with the notoriously standoffish Professor Emil Zuckerkandl. In a stroke of good fortune for Halsted, Zuckerkandl developed a painful inflammation of the epididymis, and asked the young surgeon to care for him. Halsted applied a poultice of iodoform ointment to the professor’s scrotum, which brought relief. Thereafter, said Zuckerkandl, Halsted “was invited to do all my dissection in his private room to which no one else was admitted.” Access to fresh bodies for dissection in the pre-refrigeration era was still a difficult hurdle, and he now had bodies available straight from the morgue, as well as the professor’s fullattention whenever he needed it. It was an anatomist’s dream, and Halsted made the best of it.
    Knowing little neuroanatomy, Halsted persuaded Professor Theodor Meynert to tutor him on the dissection of the brain. The sessions took place at 6 A.M., before Halsted’s pre-breakfast German lesson. It was not a pleasant experience.
    “He was always in bed on my arrival and the lesson was given in his unsavory bedroom,” Halsted wrote. It was not long before Professor Meynert was “released from the contract.”
    Giving up on neuroanatomy, Halsted began work in the new science of embryology, which was attempting to explain the origin and relationship of body parts by studying the differentiation of fetal cells from fertilization through birth. The new science captured his imagination, but it did not supplant surgery.
    He also made the acquaintance of two men with whom he felt instantly close: Anton Wölfler, whose work on surgery of the thyroid gland particularly interested Halsted, and Johannes von Mikulicz, a Polish-born contemporary of Halsted’s who would gain great fame as a pioneer of abdominal surgery. Both were serving long assistantships under the acknowledged master, Professor Theodor Billroth, the most famous surgeon in Europe. Billroth was known as an accomplished musician as well and was the closest friend of Johannes Brahms, who dedicated two string quartets to him.
    Among his surgical contributions were the first excision of a rectal cancer, the first laryngectomy, and the first successful gastrectomy to treat stomach cancer. Billroth was an early subscriber to Lister’s antiseptic techniques, and pioneered abdominal surgery adventurously but with careful preparation. As a believer in long and intensive surgical training, his graduate doctors served two or three years as apprentices doing hospital care and anatomical dissections, followed by numerous assistant years during which they performed surgery and studied the surgical literature. Everything about theexperience was stimulating, and Halsted found a regular place in the amphitheater observing the master at work.
    The new discipline of abdominal surgery with attention to hemostasis (control of bleeding) and antiseptic