Author: Susan Coventry, MD Regal House Publishing, November 2025
BOOK REVIEW: Till Taught By Pain
Author: Susan Coventry, MD Regal House Publishing, November 2025
Review by Mary Barry, MD
Dr. Susan Coventry, a Louisvillian for over a decade and a retired pediatric pathologist, began her writing career in the young adult genre. She has published over 30 romance novels and has noted for her publisher that she has no interest in writing medical fiction. But with an interest in the history of medicine, she began to focus on the development, over a hundred years ago, of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and School of Medicine. " There was a plethora of intriguing people and stories jumped out at me."
The founding physicians from Johns Hopkins feature heavily in this tale, but Dr. William Halsted and his wife Caroline star. Pathologist William Henry Welch is his constant guide, with Dr. Harvey Cushing and Dr. William Osler his co-leaders( the fourth founding member, Dr. Howard Kelly of OB-GYN, takes only a minor part of this story). Frequently, Drs. Cushing and Osler serve both as his conscience and his protectors.
For this is a tale not just of genius, of the brilliance and guts required for surgical innovation, but one of addiction and suffering. In 1884, Dr. Halsted learned about the use of cocaine as a local anesthetic. In Vienna, the ophthalmologist Dr. Karl Koller, a colleague of Sigmund Freud, had researched various solutions for safety and effectiveness as local anesthesia for the eye. He had rejected both chloral hydrate and topical morphine, but found that a two percent solution of topical cocaine was ideal for numbing up living tissue. He presented his findings to the world at the Ophthalmological Congress in Heidelberg in 1884, but later fled Austria because of antisemitism, and came to America, bringing this discovery with him. Dr. Halsted read the reports and he and his young surgical colleagues in New York tried out various injected doses. When asked how it felt, he responded, " It ' s numb – but I feel grand... just grand."
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