Harvey Williams Cushing

Harvey Williams Cushing was an American surgeon born on April 8, 1869, in Cleveland, Ohio. He is widely regarded as the founder of modern neurosurgery and was one of the first physicians to make brain surgery a routine specialty.

Cushing was the youngest of ten children in a family of physicians; his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all doctors. He studied at Yale and earned his medical degree at Harvard in 1895. He trained under William Stewart Halsted at the new Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he served as resident in surgery and developed the systematic, antiseptic operative methods that became his hallmark.

From 1912 to 1932 he was professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and surgeon-in-chief at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. There he reduced the mortality of brain tumour surgery from levels above fifty percent to less than ten percent over the course of his career. He described the syndrome of pituitary basophilism now known as Cushing's disease, refined the use of blood pressure measurement in surgery, and developed many of the instruments still used in neurosurgical operating rooms.

During World War I he led a Harvard surgical unit in France and wrote an influential war diary, From a Surgeon's Journal. His 1925 biography of his teacher William Osler, The Life of Sir William Osler, won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He retired to Yale, where he assembled an important collection of medical books and brain specimens, and died in New Haven on October 7, 1939.

The name Harvey comes from a Breton personal name Haerviu, composed of elements meaning battle and worthy. He carried this masculine name throughout his surgical career.