Free The Anatomy of Deception by Lawrence Goldstone Page A

ago, he had aseptic gloves fabricated by the Goodyear Company. Rubberized gloves are a huge step, Carroll. They promise to all but eliminate surgical infection.”
    “I had heard that surgeons in New York were beginning to use gloves,” I said, “but I didn’t know Halsted had pioneered them.”
    “It was typical,” the Professor fulminated. “One of his nurses was experiencing sensitivity to the carbolic soap with which everyone—or at least almost everyone—now washes before surgery to try to achieve some level of asepsis. To eliminate the need for caustic material to touch the skin, he had the gloves fabricated. They can be rendered truly aseptic. Thousands of lives will be saved each year.”
    Dr. Osler took a step forward and actually placed an index finger on my chest. I was stunned. I had never known him to make physical contact in anger.
    “Doctor, I would protect William Halsted as I would protect a treasure,” he told me, almost in a growl. “The good he will do over what I hope will be a long life, the lives he willsave, the suffering he will prevent … do you really desire that medical science deny itself a man such as this?”
    “No,” I replied, still not daring in my astonishment to move. “I suppose not.”
    “No supposing about it,” he grunted. Then, like a kettle removed from a flame, he stepped back and emitted a deep sigh. “This is a simple issue that pits the prejudice of ignorance against the enlightenment of knowledge. Nothing could be clearer. I confess, Carroll, I cannot understand the way some people think.” Dr. Osler withdrew his watch. “We’ll just have time. Come with me, Doctor.”
    The Professor turned on his heel and headed back the way we had come. He took the far staircase to the first floor and emerged across the hall from the operating theater. He opened the door and bade me to enter.
    “Burleigh will be clearing an abscessed bowel,” he said with disgust. “You’ve never seen Burleigh at work before, have you? I believe you will find it enlightening.”
    Wilberforce Burleigh was perhaps the Professor’s most impassioned critic on the staff. He was in his sixties, had been a surgeon for forty years, and thought that medicine was just fine as it was. Burleigh’s eyes narrowed at our arrival and he glared at us as we strode up to the gallery, muttering to himself. I could distinctly make out the words “spying on me.”
    A moment after we had been seated, the patient was wheeled in, and Burleigh turned to the task at hand. An emaciated, sandy-haired man of about forty lay on the table, covered up to his chin with a sheet, his terrified eyes flitting about and his lower jaw quivering. The surgeon took no notice.
    Burleigh was from the “flashing hands” school of surgery—everything the man did was based on speed. Quick work was not mere affectation. In traditional surgery, bleeding was only minimally controlled, usually with pads and pressure, and as a result more surgical patients died from shock than from their primary illness. What hemostasis did exist was achievedby other flashing hands, often eight or nine sets of them, belonging to the army of assistants that most surgeons employed in the effort to have every task attended to immediately. I’d heard that a wag at Yale called this process “nine women trying to have a baby in one month.”
    Recently, the development of mosquito clamps—small, scissor-shaped hemostats—allowed for more effective clamping of blood vessels. With bleeding controlled, the surgeon could work more slowly and carefully, but not every surgeon cared to slow his pace. Burleigh was notorious for continuing to place a premium on speed. He never tired of recounting that in 1846, during the first successful use of ether in surgery, Robert Liston had amputated a leg in mid-thigh in twenty-six seconds, or of bragging that he, Burleigh, had once performed eighteen operations in a single day. Fewer and fewer of that ilk were left,