This small paperback can be read easily in an afternoon or evening. It is a biography of a promising but tragic figure, surgeon Richard J. Hall (1856-1897). The author, George A. Higgins, a surgeon in Santa Barbara, Calif, has carefully collected information about Hall from a wide variety of sources that are listed in the bibliography.
Richard J. Hall was born in Armagh, now Northern Ireland. At 11 years of age he immigrated to the United States when his father, the Reverend John Hall, was called to the Fifth Avenue (Presbyterian) Church in New York, NY, in 1867. Reverend Hall had a long and distinguished career in the clergy. Young Richard attended school in New York and entered Princeton College, from which he graduated with honors in 1875. The same year, he entered the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons where he renewed an acquaintance with William Stewart Halsted,