Harvey Cushing
Harvey Williams Cushing (April 8, 1869 - October 7, 1939) was an American neurosurgeon and a pioneer of brain surgery. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest neurosurgeons of the 20th century.
Harvey Cushing (c.1900)
Life
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Cushing graduated from Yale, where he was a member of Scroll and Key and Delta Kappa Epsilon, studied medicine at Harvard Medical School and graduated in 1895. He completed his internship at Massachusetts General Hospital and then studied surgery under the guidance of a famous surgeon, William Stewart Halsted, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore. During his medical career he was a surgeon at this hospital, at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and as professor of surgery at the Harvard Medical School. From 1933, until his death, he worked at Yale University.
He married Katharine Stone Crowell on June 10, 1902. They had five children: William Harvey Cushing; Mary Benedict Cushing (who married Vincent Astor and painter James Whitney Fosburgh); Betsey Cushing, wife successively of James Roosevelt and John Hay Whitney; Henry Kirke Cushing; and Barbara Cushing, socialite wife of Stanley Grafton Mortimer and William S. Paley.
Achievements
In the beginning of the 20th century he developed many of the basic surgical techniques for operating on the brain. This established him as one of the foremost leaders and experts in the field. Under his influence neurosurgery became a new and autonomous surgical discipline.
His achievements include:
- improved considerably the survival of patients after difficult brain operations for intracranial tumors
- used x-rays to diagnose brain tumors
- used electrical stimuli for study of the human sensory cortex
- was the world's leading teacher of neurosurgeons in the first decades of 20th century
Cushing's name is commonly associated with his most famous discovery - the Cushing's disease. In 1912 he discovered an endocrinological syndrome caused by a malfunction of the pituitary gland. He described it in his work The Pituitary Body and its Disorders. Cushing was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, for a biography of one of the fathers of modern medicine - Sir William Osler. He died in 1939 in New Haven, Connecticut, and was interred in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland.