Halsted founded the department of surgery at Johns Hopkins and was considered the finest technical surgeon of his day). Multiple commentator have noted that it appears that Halsted was high on cocaine while he wrote it. You be the judge!


The New York Times wrote about Halsted's cocaine use in 2011.

"As Markel shows, the addiction of Freud’s contemporary William Halsted played out very differently. Halsted was a consummately brilliant and flashy surgeon who had captained the Yale football team and then gone on to medical training in New York, where he soon established a reputation not only for his operative skills and speed but for the outgoing personality that distinguished him as a bon vivant and hail-fellow-well-met.

[...] After several failed attempts to break his habit, including two long hospitalizations, Halsted was invited in 1888 to do laboratory research at the newly established Johns Hopkins Hospital, where his talents brought him an appointment two years later as chief of surgery. [...]

Decades after Halsted’s death in 1922, it emerged that he never did break his addiction, though it appears to have been at least partially transferred to morphine, which he used until the end of his life. Markel describes the “remarkably high-performing addict” rushing home most afternoons to administer his dose: “He took out his own morocco case containing a syringe and a soothing dose of morphine. Ever the measured surgeon, he worked hard to calibrate his dosage to calm his jitters and angst but not cloud his senses or interfere with his medical judgment; on not a few occasions, however, he miscalculated and sailed off to narcotized oblivion, abandoning his responsibilities."

Nuland S. "Sigmund Freud’s Cocaine Years". NYTimes.com. July 21, 2011.