Harvey Cushing was one of the most significant figures in the pioneering of neurosurgery.
He was born on 8 April 1869 in Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from Yale University in 1891 and studied medicine at Harvard Medical School, receiving his medical degree in 1895. In 1896, he moved to Johns Hopkins Hospital where he trained to become a surgeon under William S. Halsted, the father of American surgery. By 1899 Cushing became interested in surgery of the nervous system and began his career in neurosurgery
Cushing served as surgeon at Johns Hopkins from 1902 to 1912 and thenceforth was surgeon-in-chief at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and professor of surgery at the Harvard Medical School.
During World war I Cushing headed the first Harvard Unit of 13 surgeons and 4 nurses and left America on 22 March 1915 headed for Gibraltar and on to Paris where they ran the ‘American Ambulance’ before returning in June. Several further stints were spent in base hospitals during the subsequent war years, and he was eventually assigned as senior consultant in neurological surgery for the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe.
Cushing developed many of the operating procedures and techniques that are still basic to the surgery of the brain, and his work greatly reduced the high mortality rates that had formerly been associated with brain surgery. He became the leading expert in the diagnosis and treatment of intracranial tumours. His research on the pituitary body (1912) gained him an international reputation, and he was the first to ascribe to pituitary malfunction a type of obesity of the face and trunk now known as Cushing’s disease, or Cushing’s syndrome.
In 1932 Cushing retired but the following year joined the staff at Yale University as Sterling Professor of Medicine in Neurology.
From 1934 to 1938, Cushing and Dr Louise Eisenhardt gathered complete photographic copies of each and every history for which he had a pathological specimen and thus completed the final part of his trilogy on intracranial tumour growths.
Harvey Cushing died on 7 October 1939. He had been a prolific writer (winning a Pulitzer prize for a biography of Sir William Osler), and two years after his death the Yale Medical Library, of which Cushing had been the driving force, opened and was dedicated to his memory.
