Harvey Williams Cushing - Legacy

Legacy

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.

• He considerably improved the survival of patients after difficult brain operations for intracranial tumors.
• He used x-rays to diagnose brain tumors.
• He used electrical stimuli for study of the human sensory cortex.
• He played a pivotal role in development of the Bovie electrocautery tool with W.T. Bovie, a physicist.
• He was the world's leading teacher of neurosurgeons in the first decades of the 20th century.

Arguably, Cushing's greatest contribution came with his introduction to North America of blood pressure measurement. On visiting colleague Scipione Riva-Rocci, an Italian physician, Cushing was astonished at Riva-Rocci's non-invasive way to measure intra-arterial pressure. In 1896, Riva-Rocci developed a wall-mounted mercury manometer linked to a balloon-inflated cuff that would measure the pressure needed to compress arterial systolic pressure, i.e. systolic blood pressure measurement. Riva-Rocci's design was based on a more primitive version developed by French physician Pierre Potain. Cushing brought back a sample of Riva-Rocci's sphygmomanometer, and blood pressure measurement became a vital sign and its use spread like wildfire across the US and western world as a direct contribution by Harvey Cushing. Its use remained until Russian physician Nikolai Korotkov included diastolic blood pressure measurement in 1905 (after he discovered the famed "Korotkoff sounds") with his modern sphygmomanometer, which also replaced the mercury manometer with a smaller, round dial manometer.

Cushing's name is commonly associated with his most famous discovery—Cushing's disease. In 1912 he reported in a study an endocrinological syndrome caused by a malfunction of the pituitary gland which he termed "polyglandular syndrome." He published his findings in 1932 as "The Basophil Adenomas of the Pituitary Body and Their Clinical Manifestations: pituitary Basophilism". Cushing was also awarded the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for a book recounting the life of one of the fathers of modern medicine, Sir William Osler. In 1930, Cushing was awarded the Lister Medal for his contributions to surgical science. As part of the award, he delivered the Lister Memorial Lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in July 1930. Cushing was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1934, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

In 1988, the United States Postal Service issued a 45 cent postage stamp in his honor, as part of the Great Americans series.

Aside from Cushings many accomplishments, he developed many surgical instruments that are still in use today, most notably the Cushing Forcep. This instrument is used to grasp the thick tissues of the scalp during crainal surgery. He also developed a surgical magnet while working with the Harvard Medical Unit in France during WWI to extract bullets from the heads of wounded soldiers.

The Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University contains extensive collections in the field of medicine and the history of medicine. In 2005, the library released portions of its collection online, including the Peter Parker Collection which consists of a collection of portrait engravings and 83 mid-19th century oil paintings rendered by artist Lam Qua of Chinese tumor patients, and a biography of Harvey Cushing by John F. Fulton. In 2010, Yale placed on display Cushing's collection of brain specimens.