William Stewart Halsted

William Stewart Halsted. Our surgical heritage.

William Stewart Halsted (1852-1922): father of American surgery.

William Stewart Halsted: his life and contributions to surgery.

William Stewart Halsted was a pioneer of surgery in the USA and made many wide-ranging contributions, including the surgical treatment of breast cancer. He changed the training of surgeons from a disorganised apprenticeship to the residency training programmes used today. Halsted's research developed a better understanding of surgically amenable disease and a multitude of new techniques and ope...

On the exoneration of Dr. William H. Stewart: debunking an urban legend

BACKGROUND It is one of the most infamous quotes in the history of biomedicine: "It is time to close the book on infectious diseases, and declare the war against pestilence won." Long attributed to the United States Surgeon General, Dr. William H. Stewart (1965-1969), the statement is frequently used as a foil by scientific and lay authors to underscore the ever-increasing problems of antibioti...

"The Results of Operations for the Cure of Cancer of the Breast Performed at the Johns Hopkins Hospital from June, 1889, to January, 1894" (1894), by William Stewart Halsted

In 1894, William Stewart Halsted published "The Results of Operations for the Cure of Cancer of the Breast Performed at the Johns Hopkins Hospital from June, 1889, to January, 1894," in the medical journal Annals of Surgery. In the article, Halsted describes the results from fifty of his operations on women with breast cancer, performed at Johns Hopkins Hospital [4] in Baltimore, Maryland. Thos...