Cushing, Harvey Williams 1869-1939

CUSHING, HARVEY WILLIAMS 1869-1939

Neurosurgeon

Early Life

A native of Cleve-land, Ohio, Harvey Williams Cushing was born 9 April 1869, the sixth son and youngest in a family of ten children. His father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and an older brother were all physicians. Harvey Cushing received his B.A. degree from Yale in 1891 and his M.D. from Harvard in 1895. He was drawn to surgery by his talent for dissecting and handling delicate tissue. He interned in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and took residency training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was surgical assistant to William Stewart Halsted, one of the foremost figures in the history of American surgery. Halsted taught Cushing his slow, meticulous technique.

Early Career

Cushing spent one year in Europe (1900-1901) meeting and studying with some of the best surgeons in the world. He began general surgical practice in Baltimore in the summer of 1901 and received a minor appointment at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He gradually turned his interest toward surgery of the pituitary gland and other branches of neurological surgery. In 1910 he successfully removed a tumor from the right parietal hemisphere of the brain of Gen. Leonard Wood, and this operation enhanced Cushing's reputation as a neurosurgeon. His original and increasingly skillful operative procedures resulted in dramatic reductions in mortality equaled by no other neurosurgeon of his time.

Boston

In September 1912 Cushing moved to Boston to become surgeon in chief of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, the teaching institution of the Harvard Medical School. He contributed to drawing up specifications for the hospital, which was new at the time. At Brigham other doctors carried the burden of general surgery, thus freeing Cushing to concentrate on neurological surgery.

Neuilly

When World War I broke out, Cushing took a volunteer group from Harvard to work in the military hospital at Neuilly, France, in 1915 before the United States had entered the war. Later he organized a large army medical unit which served first with the British and then with American forces. In the winter of 1917 Cushing operated constantly, generally in hospitals near the front. He subsequently published a classic paper on war-time injuries of the brain.

Brain Surgery

Throughout his career Cushing published books and articles on various aspects of brain surgery. Some of his most important works appeared between 1925 and his formal retirement in 1932. Topics included tumors of the glioma group, intracranial physiology and surgery, acromegaly, and tumors arising from the blood vessels of the brain. His monograph on intracranial rumors included his original description of pituitary basophilism, now known as Cushing's disease, one of his greatest contributions to clinical medicine.

Pulitzer Prize

Cushing wrote a two-volume biography of Sir William Osier, a professor at Johns Hopkins who had influenced his career. Osier was influential not only as a teacher and physician, but also as the author of a textbook on medicine which was widely used for nearly half a century. Harvey Cushing won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for his work.

Book Collector

One influence Osier had on Cushing was to stimulate the latter's interest in book collecting. Throughout his career Cushing accumulated an extensive personal library of historical medicine. He bequeathed his library to Yale and persuaded some of his friends to do likewise, thus providing for the establishment of the Historical Library at the new Yale Medical Library in June 1941.

Source:

John Farquhar Fulton, Harvey Cushing: A Biography (Springfield, 111.: Thomas, 1946).