William Halsted

William Stewart Halsted was an American surgeon who joined Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1889, became its surgeon-in-chief the following year, and in 1892 was named its first professor of surgery, one of the Big Four founding professors of the new Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He introduced strict aseptic technique into surgical practice, brought rubber gloves into the operating room in 1889, developed the radical mastectomy for breast cancer, and founded the surgical residency system at Johns Hopkins, the first of its kind in North America and the model later adopted throughout the United States. Throughout his professional life Halsted was addicted to cocaine and later also to morphine, dependencies that began with his own experiments testing cocaine as a local anesthetic on himself.