Founder Member
President: 1920-1921

1869-1939

HARVEY WILLIAMS CUSHING, youngest of 10 children of Betsy Maria Williams and Henry Kirke Cushing, M.D., was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 8, 1869. He was fourth in a direct line of doctors. He entered Yale University in 1887, where he was on the baseball team and received his A.B. in 1891. He received his M.D. and M.A. from Harvard in 1895. After internship at Massachusetts General Hospital, he went through surgical assistant residency and surgical residency at Johns Hopkins (1896-1900). He spent the next year under Kocher and Kronecker in Bern, and Sherington in Liverpool, returning to Baltimore as Associate Professor of Surgery until 1912. His interests turned progressively toward the nervous system, although he continued to do general surgery. He was very active in the surgical laboratory, many of his early works being devoted to intracranial pressure, cerebrospinal fluid, the pituitary body, trigeminal neuralgia, eighth-nerve tumors and technical developments in neurological surgery.

He married Katherine Crowell of Cleveland in 1902. Their children were Henry Kirke, William Harvey, Mary, Betsy, and Barbara.

In 1912 he became Moseley Professor of Surgery at Harvard, a position he held until 1932, when he became Professor Emeritus. During this time, he was Surgeon-In-Chief at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. In World War I, he was director of Army Base Hospital 5 from 1917-1919, and Senior Consultant in Neurological Surgery. He returned to Yale as Sterling Professor of Neurology (1933-37) and Professor Emeritus 1937. He was director of studies in History of Medicine at Yale (1937-39).

His publications, well over 300, vary from a one-page article concerning acromegaly in Time, to a two-volume biography of Sir William Osler, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in Letters. There were 13 books and monographs. His later fields of special interests were brain tumors, especially gliomas, pituitary adenomas and meningiomas.

He was a member of many societies and received many honors; among them were: President, American Neurological Association; Charter Member and President, American Society of Clinical Surgery; Member, American Physiological Society; President, American Surgical Association; President, American College of Surgeons; and President, Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons. Special awards included Montclair Yale Bowl, Henry Jacob Bigelow Medal, Gold Medal from National Institute of Social Sciences. He received honorary degrees from Yale, Washington University, Western Reserve, Queens, Belfast, Cambridge, Jefferson, John Casimir, Trinity College, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dartmouth, Strasbourg, Brussels, Budapest, Harvard, Rochester, Bern, Northwestern, Amsterdam, Paris, Syracuse, Leeds and Oxford. His military honors included the Distinguished Service Medal.

On his 70th birthday, April 8, 1939, friends, relatives, associates and admirers gathered at a meeting of the Harvey Cushing Society in New Haven, to pay him honor. It was a fitting farewell for a great man. He died on October 7, 1939.