The habitual use of morphine was far more socially acceptable in those days but was still a black mark for a doctor. He finally kicked his dependence on cocaine-but only by replacing it with morphine. ![]() In 1886 Halsted took a six-month leave of absence from his hospital to rehabilitate himself. To learn more about its effects Halsted, nobly but disastrously, began injecting himself with the drug. In the early 1880s he began experimenting with this new drug as a topical anesthetic, notably in eye surgery. One innovation, however, nearly ruined Halsted’s life-cocaine. He was best known in his day for introducing the radical mastectomy to treat breast cancer-a (now-discredited) procedure where the surgeon excavated not only the tumor but the entire breast and most of the muscles of the chest wall. He’d trained with top doctors in Europe, then settled in New York and developed innovative new procedures for operating on gallstones, thyroid glands, blood vessels, and hernias. Halsted was regarded as one of the most brilliant surgeons in the country. These qualities made her a natural fit for surgery, and in 1889 she moved to Baltimore and took a job as the chief surgical nurse at the brand-new Johns Hopkins Hospital. She wanted to get an education and earn a living for herself by becoming a nurse.Īs a nurse Caroline was known for her manual dexterity and her cool, calm demeanor. ![]() ![]() She in fact shocked her family in 1885 by announcing she was moving to New York. But the aunts quickly realized Caroline had bigger ambitions than plantation life. Caroline did take to gardening, although she had to wear gloves to protect her sensitive hands. The aunts groomed Caroline to be a Southern belle-someone destined to marry a plantation owner. After that disaster the Hamptons were aristocrats in name only, and the orphaned Caroline was raised by three aunts in a tiny home behind the ruins of the old family manor.Īlan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions The family fortune suffered a huge blow in 1865 when William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces torched the Hampton plantation. (Her uncle was Wade Hampton, a famous Confederate lieutenant general.) Sadly, she lost her mother to tuberculosis in 1862, when she was less than a year old, and then lost her father in a Civil War battle a year later. Hampton came from a family of South Carolina aristocrats. Every time your doctor or nurse, or even a bus driver or grocery clerk, snaps on a pair of gloves, you can say a silent thank-you to Caroline Hampton and Joseph Bloodgood. It wasn’t Halsted who introduced gloves but his now-forgotten assistants. Historically, even simple measures, such as doctors wearing gloves during surgery, were met with fierce resistance.Īnd while doctors’ lore usually credits a famous surgeon named William Halsted with introducing gloves to the surgical theater, this is a case where the lore is wrong. ![]() But however obvious it seems today that protective gear can prevent infections, that hasn’t always been the case. We all look like surgeons in public now, donning masks and gloves even to go grocery shopping. In the age of coronavirus personal protective equipment has become ubiquitous.
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