Harvey Williams Cushing Biography

Harvey Williams Cushing was born to Betsy and Henry Cushing on April 8, 1869 in Cleveland, Ohio. The son and grandson of physicians, Cushing's father specialized in diseases of women and in medical law. Cushing carried on the family tradition and attended Yale College and Harvard Medical School, earning his M.D. from Harvard in 1895. He then served as a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He traveled in Europe for one year (1900-1901) where he studied under two important physiologists, Emil Kocher (1841-1917) in Bern, Germany, and Charles Scott Sherrington in London, England.

After his return from Europe, Cushing began to concentrate on the specialty for which he was to become famous: neurosurgery. In the early 1900s, the techniques of brain surgery were poorly developed and survival rates from such procedures were close to zero. Stimulated by his work in Bern and London, Cushing began to attack, one at a time, the specific problems that made neurosurgery so dangerous. For example, he developed silver clips that could be used to control bleeding during surgery. He was also successful in finding ways to cauterize blood vessels in the brain with electrical current. The use of these and other techniques made possible surgical procedures that could not be attempted earlier. As a result, survival rates rose dramatically.

Cushing's influence extended far beyond his own work. He established the Hunterian Laboratory at Johns Hopkins in 1905 and, later, the Laboratory of Surgical Research at Harvard. During his four decades at Harvard and Yale, he personally trained a large portion of the neurosurgeons who were to lead the field for generations to come.

Cushing's name is memorialized in medical terminology as a result of his research in another field. Beginning in 1908, he studied the pituitary gland and its malignancies. Eventually he was able to prove that tumors in the pituitary can result in a disorder characterized by wasting, obesity of the face and trunk, atrophy of the skin, and accumulation of fluids in the body. That condition is now known as Cushing's disease.

Cushing was also interested in the history of medicine and, in 1925, wrote a biography of William Osler (1849-1919) that earned him the 1926 Pulitzer Prize.

Cushing left Johns Hopkins in 1911 to become Professor of Surgery at the Harvard Medical School and Chief Surgeon at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He moved from Harvard to Yale in 1933, becoming Sterling Professor of Neurosurgery. He retired in 1937 and died in New Haven, Connecticut, on October 7, 1939.