1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Cushing, Harvey

CUSHING, HARVEY (1869-      ), American surgeon, was born at Cleveland, O., April 8 1869. He graduated from Yale in 1891 and from the Harvard Medical School in 1895. After doing exceptional cerebral surgery abroad under Kocher at Berne 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 University, 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 centres. 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 professor of surgery in the Harvard Medical School and surgeon-in-chief at the Peter Bent Brigham hospital in Boston. In 1913 he was made an hon. F.R.C.S. (London). 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 a U.S. base hospital attached to the B.E.F. in France. In 1918 he was made senior consultant in neurological surgery for the A.E.F. He held the rank of colonel in the Medical Corps of the U.S. army.