Kane was also a well published contributor of innovations in surgical procedures and equipment, including asbestos bandages, mica windows for brain surgery, and multiple site hypodermoclysis.
He also proposed tattooing mothers and newborn babies with matching marks to avoid accidental mix ups.
Kane was also in the public eye in 1931 when he testified at the sensational trial of his son, Elisha Kent Kane III, a college professor, who was acquitted of murder in Elizabeth City County, Virginia after the drowning death of his wife during their trip to a Back River Light beach.
Thomas L. Kane also played a role in preventing war with the Mormons through his friendship with Brigham Young.
Elisha was charged with murdering his wife, Jenny G. Kane (1898–1931) by drowning, at a beach on Chesapeake Bay.
The trial was a sensation at the time: crowds of people gathered outside the courthouse, unable to find room inside.
[5] Kane died of pneumonia at the age of 70 in 1932, shortly after the trial of his son and just a few months after his major hernia operation.
Patients were admitted on condition that Evan O'Neill Kane, as the chief surgeon, had the final say in their treatment.
The commissioners also requested that the private practice offices of Evan and Thomas Kane be moved outside the hospital.
A large proportion of the estimated 1,000 operations Kane performed in the three years from 1898 to 1900 were treatment for accidents on the railways, many of which were laparotomies.
[9][10] Kane played music with a phonograph in the operating theatre prior to anaesthetizing the patient, believing it had a calming effect on his patients more effective than conversation (as the surgeon was often distracted and conversations with assistants often dwindled),[11] thus making Kane responsible for one of the first uses of music as a medical therapy.
[12] Kane invented an improvement to the Murphy button, a device then commonly used for intestinal anastomosis, but now usually done with a surgical stapler.
[13] Kane was seeking a device with a larger aperture and less possibility of blockage after losing a patient to whom he had fitted a Murphy button.
[14][15] Kane presented a paper to the American Academy of Railway Surgeons in 1900 addressing the difficulty of administering intravenous infusions in the field.
Normal hypodermoclysis would be too slow in emergency conditions, but Kane's invention speeded up the rate of fluid replacement many times.
[16] Kane's device was subsequently criticised for its use of an unsealed rubber bulb by Edwin Hasbrouck, who proposed an alternative improved design.
Influenced by his work in railway surgery, he was particularly concerned with materials that were good for use in the field and sometimes advocated the use of supplies that could be obtained locally from hardware stores and similar suppliers.
Kane was aware of cases where claims had been made of babies being mixed up and wished to avoid any possibility of this occurring in his hospital.
But it was the operation of removing his own appendix under local anaesthetic, performed on 15 February 1921 at the age of 60, which brought him wider media attention.
At this time the operation was rather more major than today, as the incision to remove an appendix was much larger than that needed for modern keyhole surgery techniques.
[7][26] In the latter part of his career, Kane had started signing his handiwork by tattooing on his patients the letter "K" in morse code ( ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ) using India ink.
However, during his hernia operation he became too drowsy to finish the stitching up so this task and the tattooing fell to Howard Cleveland (who later became Chief Surgeon in 1938[7]).
For many years Richard Bartholdt attempted to introduce a bill reversing this decision and his efforts were supported by a petition of 279 physicians.