The Anatomy of Deception - Lawrence Goldstone [25]
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 achieved by 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, however, as almost every surgeon entering the field now followed the lead of the man who had invented mosquito clamps specifically to staunch blood flow during surgery—William Stewart Halsted.
Ten assistants stood at the table dressed in hospital uniform instead of gowns, while Burleigh remained in street clothes. Corrigan, the bulldog, who was not trusted to do more than take notes in the Dead House, was to the surgeon’s immediate left, meaning that he was chief assistant. The Professor rolled his eyes at the sight.
Burleigh signaled another assistant and the ether cone was placed over the patient’s face. As the drug was poured, Burleigh faced the gallery, which contained about twenty students in addition to ourselves, and announced, “Today, I will be treating a patient with acute diverticulitis, removing a suspected abscess from the sigmoid colon and then resecting the bowel.” He smiled, parting an extremely full beard. “Please watch carefully. I don’t wait for stragglers.”
After the patient had been poked with a long needle to ensure that the ether had rendered him senseless, Burleigh removed a case in fine Turkish leather from his coat. I recognized it at once as the deluxe Tiemann & Company Patent Catch Pocket surgical set, advertised in their catalog at thirty-three dollars, the most expensive kit on the market. At eighteen surgeries per day, I surmised, Burleigh could well afford it. He opened the case,