Harvey Williams Cushing - Biography

Biography

Cushing was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Bessie Williams and Kirke Cushing, a physician whose family came to Hingham, Massachusetts, as Puritans in the 17th century. Harvey Cushing was the youngest of ten children. He graduated with an A.B. degree in 1891 from Yale University, where he was a member of Scroll and Key and Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter). He studied medicine at Harvard Medical School and earned his medical degree in 1895. Cushing completed his internship at Massachusetts General Hospital and then did a residency in surgery under the guidance of a famous surgeon, William Stewart Halsted, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore.

After doing exceptional cerebral surgery abroad under Kocher at Bern and Sherrington at Liverpool, he began private practice in Baltimore. Here, at the age of 32, he was made associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and at the hospital was placed in full charge of cases of surgery of the central nervous system. Yet he found time to write numerous monographs on surgery of the brain and spinal column and to make important contributions to bacteriology. He made (with Kocher) a study of intracerebral pressure and (with Sherrington) contributed much to the localization of the cerebral centers. In Baltimore, he developed the method of operating with local anaesthesia, and his paper on its use in hernia gave him a European reputation. He has also made important contributions to the study of blood pressure in surgery. In 1911, he was appointed surgeon-in-chief at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. He became a professor of surgery at the Harvard Medical School starting in 1912. In 1913, he was made an honorary F.R.C.S. (London). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1914. In 1915, before the Clinical Congress of Surgeons in Boston, he showed the possibility of influencing stature by operating on the pituitary gland.

During 1917-9, he was director of U.S. base hospital attached to the British Expeditionary Force in France. In 1918, he was made senior consultant in neurological surgery for the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, attaining the rank of Colonel (O6). In that capacity, he treated Lt. Edward Revere Osler, the son of Sir William Osler, who was fatally wounded during the third battle of Ypres.

From 1933 to 1937, when he retired, he worked at Yale University School of Medicine.

Cushing died on October 7, 1939 in New Haven, Connecticut, from complications of a myocardial infarction. He was interred at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. Interestingly, an autopsy performed on Cushing revealed that his brain harbored a colloid cyst of the third ventricle.