PAIN    REGIONAL
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No, anesthesia wasn’t invented here, but nonetheless St. Luke’s and Roosevelt Hospitals share a rich history with respect to surgical and anesthetic innovations. While each hospital site existed independently long before the merger, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt was officially formed in 1979 by a union of St. Luke’s Hospital, adjacent to the campus of Columbia University, and The Roosevelt Hospital, located at Tenth Avenue and 59th Street.

Several surgical firsts occurred within these walls, including the first use of sterile surgical gloves in the 1880s, the development of the ‘muscle-splitting’ approach to appendectomy by then Chairman of Surgery Dr. Charles McBurney in 1892, and the first open heart operation performed in New York City in 1955. In 1935, the first successful removal of a cancerous lung was accomplished by Drs. Henry Lyle and Alexander Ada while working at the St. Luke’s Hospital

It is fitting that St. Luke’s-Roosevelt is a world leader in regional anesthesia, as it was at The Roosevelt Hospital in 1884 that the world’s first nerve block was performed by Richard John Hall and William Stewart Halsted. Cocaine, a compound recently isolated from coca leaves, was catching the interest of ophthalmologists in the same year for its ability to provide topical anesthesia of the eye. Hall and Halsted saw the possibility of a ‘conduction’ block and deliberately injected the substance next to branches of their own musculocutaneous and ulnar nerves, happily observing the anesthetic effect on a specific part of the limb.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Dr. Karl Connell, an Attending Surgeon at Roosevelt Hospital, introduced an array of life-saving devices including the Connell airway, the Connell “anesthetometer”, the Connell meter for measuring gas flow during anesthesia and the gas mask used by American troops during WWI.
Residency training program department of anesthesiology. @2007 St. Lukes Roosevelt a member of Continuum Health Partners.