Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1476

GEORGE HAYWARD (1791-1863) Surgical reports, and miscellaneous papers on medical subjects. Phillips, Sampson and Company 1855 viii [9]-452 pp. 18.1 cm.

Hayward, the first individual to perform a major surgical operation with ether anesthesia, studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, after which, as was customary in his day, he traveled and studied abroad. Returning to Boston, he helped found a private medical school which survived for eight years. He was later appointed to Harvard's chair of the principles of surgery and clinical surgery and was visiting surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He performed the second surgical operation ever done using ether anesthesia only the day after Warren completed the first operation (see No. 1345). Later, on November 7, 1846, he did the first major operation under ether anesthesia when he amputated the leg of a girl of twenty. In addition to selected medical papers, the present work includes accounts of his experience with ether anesthesia and his successful treatment of a vesico-vaginal fistula. Although John Peter Mettauer (1787-1875), a Virginia gynecologist, is believed to have performed the first successful operation for vesico-vaginal fistula, Hayward had been the first to report it in 1839.

See Related Record(s): 1345

Cited references: Cushing H196