1893 - Medicine

Medicine

President Cleveland comes to New York for an operation to excise a tumor in his mouth caused by his cigar smoking. His old friend Dr. Joseph D. Bryant, now 48, was state health commissioner when Cleveland was governor and performs the procedure successfully July 1 aboard E. C. Benedict's yacht the Oneida in Long Island Sound, but the public will not learn of the event until 1917—9 years after Cleveland's death from another cause. Nitrous oxide is used to anesthetize the patient, five physicians and a dentist are in attendance, a large sarcoma is removed from Cleveland's left upper jaw, he is fitted with a rubber jaw, it is announced that he has had a tooth removed, and the 250-pound chief executive will lose 65 pounds during his recuperation, which will take several months.

Chicago surgeon Daniel Hale Williams performs the world's first open-heart surgery July 10, saving the life of a street fighter with a knife wound in an artery near his heart (see Williams, 1891; Lillehei, 1954).

The Johns Hopkins Medical School and Hospital are founded at the 17-year-old Baltimore university. Physician in chief is Canadian-born William Osler, 44, whose Principles and Practices of Medicine was published 2 years ago and who is the leading medical professor of his time. Surgery professor W. S. Halsted, pathologist W. H. Welch, and gynecological surgeon Howard Atwood Kelly, 35, will help Osler give the school a leadership unmatched in U.S. medicine (see Welch, 1878; Halsted, 1884)The new school admits women on the same basis as men—the first medical school to do so. Funds allocated to start the school have been invested in Baltimore & Ohio Railroad stock, which has fared poorly; Mary Garrett, daughter of the B&O's president, has donated $300,000 to the school on condition that women be admitted. But within 10 years all but three of the 17 U.S. medical schools now operating will have closed due in part to efforts to make them coeducational (see Flexner Report, 1910).

Louisiana's National Hansen's Disease Center has its beginnings as seven lepers are brought by coal barge to former slave cabins on an abandoned sugar plantation at Carville on the Mississippi River. Initially called the Louisiana Leper Home, the combination residence, hospital, and prison will continue to house victims of the disease for more than a century, with as many as 400 inmate-patients by the mid-1980s before aggressive, multiple-drug therapy and orthopedic management reduce the number by more than half.