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A place at Dr. Halsted’s table
A century-old oaken plank on a trough connects VCU to the origins of modern surgery.
Visitors to the second floor of VCU’s Health Sciences Library will find a weathered oak table settled against a wall. It looks like a trough — stretching almost 6 feet — with a narrower but longer plank lying on top.
Rustic, unassuming and likely built in the late 1800s, the operating table was designed by William Stewart Halsted, M.D., a Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor considered the father of modern surgery.
Halsted reinvented the discipline, wrote Gerald Imber, M.D., in his 2010 biography, transforming the “shunned black sheep of the medical world into a specialty offering the promise of mightily alleviating the suffering of the human condition.”
Halsted did so by approaching surgery as fastidiously as he cared for his wardrobe, which he allegedly sent to Paris to be laundered.
He pioneered procedures for gallbladder removal, hernia repair and mastectomies; demanded a clean, aseptic surgical environment; collaborated with Goodyear Rubber Co., to create surgical gloves; promoted careful handling of tissue; experimented with local anesthesia (becoming addicted to cocaine in the process); developed precision instruments; and designed operating tables like the one in VCU’s medical artifacts collection.
Halsted ushered in “a new and better way of regarding the patient,” Baltimore-based journalist H.L. Mencken wrote in the March 1931 issue of American Mercury, the political and literary magazine he cofounded seven years earlier. “He showed that manhandled tissues, though they could not yell, could yet suffer and die. He studied the natural recuperative powers of the body, and showed how they could be made to help the patient. He stood against reckless smashing, and taught that a surgeon must walk very warily.”
The unassuming table on the library’s second floor is a tangible reminder of the degree to which Halsted elevated his field. It is a physical link to medical history, a trace of a bygone era when lives were saved and improved — and sometimes lost — atop an oaken plank.
An MCV-Johns Hopkins connection
The table came to VCU Libraries from Harry Justice Warthen Jr., M.D., longtime assistant professor in the Medical College of Virginia’s Department of Surgery, by way of the Richmond Academy of Medicine. Warthen had been a resident in the surgical residency program Halsted created at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He bought the table from Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1932 for a “nominal sum.”
Among the first
Halsted wasn’t the first to design a modern operating table. That was Charles Averill, an English surgeon practicing in the early 1800s. Halsted was among the first, however, to design a table that could be adapted for the Trendelenburg position, where a patient’s feet are higher than their head. Named for 19th-century German physician Friedrich Trendelenburg, the position gives surgeons better access to a patient’s lower organs. Halsted’s table originally had a triangular block at each end so the board resting on top could be adjusted.
Down the drain
When Johns Hopkins Hospital first opened, surgeries were performed in the basement. Patients could be strapped on the table’s long board and carried to the operating room, where the board would be laid on the trough. It could be moved sideways to adjust the gutters so the fluids could drain into the basin and then through a hole into a galvanized iron can.
Wax on, wax off
Melted paraffin wax was rubbed onto the table with a hot iron at least every two months to seal and protect the wood.
A post-bender destination
By the time Warthen was a resident, metal surgical tables had replaced wooden ones. Margaret Kidd, senior curator for the Health Sciences at VCU Libraries Special Collections and Archives, says Halsted’s table was likely used at that time for intoxicated patients who needed their stomachs pumped.
