William S. Halsted

Halsted developed the radical mastectomy in the 1880s, a highly invasive procedure that involved surgically removing the entire breast, the underlying pectoral muscles, and the axillary lymph nodes. This technique dramatically reduced local recurrence rates and became the global standard treatment for breast cancer for nearly a century.

While working at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Halsted established the first formal surgical residency training program in the United States. His system required young physicians to spend years progressing through increasing levels of responsibility, a model that is still used in modern medical education today.

Halsted was a pioneer of aseptic surgical techniques and was actually the first surgeon to introduce heat-sterilized rubber gloves into the operating room in 1889. He originally had the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company design them to protect the highly sensitive hands of his scrub nurse, Caroline Hampton, from harsh antiseptic chemicals.

Historical accounts reveal that Halsted secretly struggled with a severe addiction to cocaine and morphine for the majority of his professional career. This lifelong dependency began in the 1880s when he and his colleagues actively injected themselves with cocaine to study its potential as a new local anesthetic.