Release Date: Nov. 4, 2025
About The Book:
Inspired by the groundbreaking discoveries of ether and chloroform anesthesia, William Stewart Halsted pursues a surgical career with relentless ambition, daring to perform operations deemed impossible by his peers. His reputation skyrockets with each bold success— until his quest for an effective local anesthetic leads him to inject himself with cocaine.
Caroline, the niece of Confederate General Wade Hampton, seeks to escape the constraints of post-war South Carolina by training as a nurse. When she takes a position at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital, she finds herself captivated by the brilliant yet troubled chief of surgery, Dr. Halsted.
Till Taught by Pain is a poignant exploration of love and sacrifice, as Caroline grapples with the difficult choice between enabling her husband’ s addiction and supporting his pioneering career. As their lives intertwine, both must confront the consequences of ambition, the nature of love, and the toll of personal demons on their shared dreams.
About The Author:
Susan Coventry is a retired physician with a lifelong historical fiction obsession. Her first novel, The Queen’s Daughter, was a YA historical set in the Middle Ages. She has since switched from YA to adult novels and moved on from medieval Europe to the turn-of-the-20th century U.S. She lives in Louisville, KY , with her historian husband, Brad Asher. https://susancoventry.com/
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Book Blurbs:
Susan Coventry’s compelling novel TILL TAUGHT BY PAIN plunges us into the world of medicine in New York City and Baltimore’s new Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1880s and the emergence of a brilliant young doctor who, while researching cocaine as a local anesthetic, becomes addicted first to it and then morphine. Based on history and drawing from diaries and letters long locked away, Dr. William Halsted is an unforgettable character, marching through the shadows of early operating and research rooms, alternatingly making brilliant strides, and then once again locked in his own agonizing darkness. Even the support of his physician friends and the love of Halsted’s clear-minded and devoted head nurse who becomes his wife, cannot entirely defeat the call of his secret syringes. An utterly engrossing story of a small group of people in medicine well over a hundred years ago. I was so sorry when the story ended, not wanting to leave the company of this difficult doctor who achieved the near perfection he sought in the operating room but never in himself. -Stephanie Cowell, author of The Boy in the Rain, Claude & Camille, and The Physician of London. Winner of an American Book Award.
With the skill of a surgeon, Susan Coventry stitches together an in-depth historical fiction novel about Dr. William Halsted, a brilliant physician whose many contributions to modern medicine were remarkable. Coventry infuses the complicated characters of Halsted and his wife Caroline with authentic love and heart-rending frustration. Anyone who’s dealt with addiction or who’s loved someone struggling with addiction will find an honest, yet compassionate portrait of a gifted man, who though he soared so high, might have achieved even more.-Tracey D. Buchanan, author of Toward the Corner of Mercy and Peace
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