Volume 48, Number 14 · September 20, 2001
'A Very Wide and Deep Dissection'
By Sherwin B. Nuland
The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America
by Barron H. Lerner
Oxford University Press, 383 pp., $30.00
None of the physicians in attendance at the April 20, 1894, meeting of the Clinical Society of Maryland doubted that the medical paper about to be presented would be the highlight of the day. In fact, some in the auditorium had traveled long distances to Baltimore just to hear it, and they paid attention to little else until the name of the speaker, William Stewart Halsted, was announced. Although the hospital he worked in had been established only six years earlier, it was already recognized as having excellent possibilities for reforming the American system of medical education. Johns Hopkins Medical School, with which the hospital was associated, was even newer, having opened less than a year before that day. The school had already showed the promise of accomplishing its announced mission, which was to revolutionize the teaching of young physicians by introducing them to a scientific approach to healing that was virtually absent anywhere else in the US. Of all the talented and enthusiastic young faculty members who had been recruited to the Johns Hopkins Medical School and its hospital, none was more the object of professional and personal curiosity than Halsted. The forty-two-year-old surgeon seemed to many an odd, withdrawn figure.
Review, 3653 words
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