Harvey Cushing

He was the fourth generation of Cushing physicians and the youngest of ten children in a Cleveland house where medicine was the family trade rather than a choice. What separated him from his father and his great-grandfather was a school. The Cleveland Manual Training School taught experiment, physics and hand skill, and its dexterity drills turned out to be a surgical education nobody had planned. Yale gave him a degree in 1891 and Harvard a medical one in 1895. Johns Hopkins then put him under William Stewart Halsted, the most exacting surgeon in America. He finished his training in Europe with Theodor Kocher in Bern and Charles Sherrington in Liverpool, and came home carrying an Italian physician's inflatable cuff and mercury column for measuring blood pressure.

Brain surgery before Cushing killed most of the people who consented to it. He attacked the problem from every side at once: local anesthesia, X-ray diagnosis, an electrocautery tool built with the physicist William Bovie, and forceps and a ventricular cannula that still carry his name. Johns Hopkins put him in charge of all central nervous system cases at 32. In 1912 he described the pituitary disorder now called Cushing's disease, and in 1915 he demonstrated that a surgeon could change a patient's stature by operating on the gland. He trained the men who then founded the specialty elsewhere, Walter Dandy and Wilder Penfield among them. In 1926 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his life of William Osler. The Nobel committee received at least 38 nominations for him and never gave him anything.

In early October 1918, running a neurosurgical service in France, he came down with what he called the grippe and what was almost certainly the influenza pandemic. He never fully recovered. He also never stopped collecting. Every tumor he removed went into a registry along with its photographs and case records, more than 2,000 specimens by the time his pathologist Louise Eisenhardt had charge of it, which is why his results could be audited at all. He retired from Yale in 1937 and died in New Haven on October 7, 1939, of complications of a heart attack. The autopsy found a colloid cyst of the third ventricle inside his own head, a growth in exactly the part of the brain he had spent 40 years teaching other surgeons how to reach.

His name attached itself to more things than most surgeons manage: a disease, a reflex, a pair of forceps, a Liberty Ship, an Army hospital at Framingham and a 45-cent stamp issued in 1988. The jars came back out in 2010, when Yale put the brain collection on public display. The library holding his rare books carries his name beside John Hay Whitney's, the second husband of his daughter Betsey, who had first married a son of Franklin Roosevelt. Another daughter married William Paley of CBS. The surgeon's children married into the century's money, and the specialty he assembled outgrew him so completely that it no longer has to say who assembled it.

Harvey Cushing's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Pituitary Body and its Disorders book
  The first full account of the syndrome later named for him 1912
• Tumours of the Nervus Acousticus book 1917
• The Bovie electrocautery unit invention
  Developed with the physicist William T. Bovie and still standard in the operating room —
• The Life of Sir William Osler book
  Awarded the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Biography 1925
• The Basophil Adenomas of the Pituitary Body article
  The published version of the disorder he first reported in 1912 1932
• From a Surgeon's Journal, 1915-1918 book
  His war diaries 1936

• April 8, 1869 aged 0 Born in Cleveland, the youngest of ten children His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all physicians.
• 1895 aged ~26 Takes his medical degree at Harvard An internship at Massachusetts General followed, then Halsted's residency at Johns Hopkins.
• 1901 aged ~32 At 32 he is given all of Johns Hopkins's central nervous system surgery
• 1911 aged ~42 Becomes surgeon-in-chief at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston
• 1912 aged ~43 Reports the pituitary syndrome now called Cushing's disease He first called it polyglandular syndrome.
• May 5, 1917 aged 48 Commissioned a major in the US Army Medical Corps He became senior consultant in neurological surgery to the American Expeditionary Forces.
• October 1918 aged 49 Falls ill in France with what was probably the Spanish flu He described it as the grippe and never fully recovered.
• 1926 aged ~57 Wins the Pulitzer Prize for his life of William Osler
• October 7, 1939 aged 70 Dies at New Haven The autopsy found a colloid cyst of the third ventricle in his own brain.

• William Stewart Halsted 1852–1922
  Established aseptic surgical technique and the American surgical residency training system. trained under
• William Osler 1849–1919
  Built bedside clinical teaching into American medical education as a founding Johns Hopkins professor. wrote his life
• John J. Pershing 1860–1948
  Commander of the American Expeditionary Forces who built and led the U.S. Army in World War I. served in his expeditionary force
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. his daughter married the president's son