The world was young, leafy green and overrun with dinosaurs so many eons ago that stories from prehistoric times are mostly fantasy and supposition. But the medical world was exactly that young, primitive and full of unusual creatures barely a century ago, giving historians ample fodder for true stories stranger than any fantasy.

Few of them surpass the biography of the man often credited with founding modern American surgery: William Halsted, professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, and lifelong drug addict. Gerald Imber’s new biography is the first retelling of Halsted’s story in many decades and a particularly expert and thought-provoking narrative.

Halsted was born in New York in 1852, the not especially promising son of a wealthy family. A mediocre student, he wandered through Yale leaving behind no record of ever borrowing a book from its library.

He chose medicine not from any affinity for the sick and the suffering (and suffer they did back then, with filthy hospitals, no antibiotics and primitive anesthesia). Rather, the cabalistic secrets of the anatomy lab drew him in, and he fell in love with the complex structures of the body’s interior and their arcane nomenclature.