Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery

The book is a good read, particularly to those interested in medicine and more particularly, medical history. The book is well written, informative and holds ones attention amazingly well. Although I have never read Michael Bliss (author) before, I will certainly be looking out for him in the future. I very much recommend reading the book.

Harvey Cushing's life and achievements deserved the very best of a literary recounting and this is it. Previous biographies (including Fulton's "classic") of Cushing, the Father of Neurosurgery, were uniformly dull or disappointing. Michael Bliss has now written the very best Cushing biography and has undoubtedly set the standard for years to come. It is extremely readable despite being detailed in both the technical aspects of neurosurgery and also Cushing's private life. Cushing himself won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of William Osler and this work is at least as good.

It is a strange mystery why a man of such accomplishments and medical innovation in the history of neurosurgery, the American pioneer in fact, is not more well known in popular culture. Dr. Harvey Cushing has to be one of the most fascinating, complex and astounding medical personalities in the last century. He became the first of American medical men to be an international leader in this special field. Harvey was part of a long line of medical men, his great grandfather, grandfather and father were all competent physicians. A Yale graduate, later attending Harvard Medical and working at John Hopkins, he paved the way, as he called "The Northwest Passage", in the area of brain tumour surgery, his OR innovations, insistence on sterile working conditions, the use of clips to prevent excessive bleeding and the diagnosis of brain tumours, were all devised and applied by him, having operated on over 2000 patients with brain tumour related illnesses during his long career. This man takes the term "workaholic" and takes it to an entirely new level. A tireless researcher, recorder, bibliophile, surgeon and prolific writer, his drive and obsession for work and life, set the precedent for future surgeons. A truly remarkable individual. Michael Bliss, however, is a competent biographer, revealing Cushing's genius as well as his many faults. Cushing was an irascible perfectionist with zero tolerance for any incompetence in the OR. His arrogance and caustic tongue became the stuff of legend; interestingly, as Bliss implies, his personality has become almost a stereotype for the brilliant surgeon, egotistic, sarcastic with no patience for mistakes while in surgery. He was a difficult man to work with and for, however, his care for his patients took priority over all other actions. Ambitious and single-minded with an insatiable appetite for knowledge, Cushing pioneered brain surgery, writing volumes of medical articles and essays, countless lectures, and even a Pulitzer Prize winning two-volume biography on his mentor and world renowned physician, William Osler. There are numerous anecdotes in this fine biography, but the one that really stands out is Cushing's first experience with a patient who dies in front of his eyes. A young student at Harvard, he managed to get invited to assist with `etherizing' patients for surgery. Weeks pass and everything is moving along fine until one evening he administers the ether to a young woman under-going an operation for a strangulated hernia, whose chances for survival are next to nil. The patient dies before the operation commences minutes after Cushing etherizes her. This of course devastated the young medical student, who walked the streets of Boston deciding to quit the profession. When he returned and told his teacher of his intent, he berated the boy, calling him "a damned fool" and to buck-up, for they had work to do. He continued on, of course, but remembered this incident over thirty years later. As any good

I must second the other positive review of the book. I had previously read his biography of Osler, when it came out a number of years ago, and found it to the most well-rounded portrait of Osler that I have read. His biography of Cushing is equally is good. Bliss writes well and easily. I think his estimate of Cushing is a fair one. He gives all sides: the driven surgical pioneer and mentor who really established neurosurgery as a legitimate field, but also the workaholic who neglected his family and could be cruel and abusive to co-workers.(Great to be his patient but not one of his children) I found the contrasts between Cushing and Osler that Bliss draws out particularly interesting, and I would recommend that the Osler biography be read in conjunction with this one. Also, I also appreciated that Bliss presents the evidence and allows the reader to make his or her own judgements about Cushing, particularly in regards to his racial prejudice. Bliss limits the amount of medical terms, so I think the book could be read by and appeal to someone with little knowledge of medicine. Overall, highly recommended.

Another excellent book from the Canadian historian Michael Bliss. This biography is a companion volume to Bliss's outstanding biography of the great William Osler. Together, these biographies tell the story not only of their subjects but also of the rise of North American medicine from provincial status to equality, and in some respects superiority, with the great clinical centers of Europe. Harvey Cushing was the first great pioneering surgeon produced by the USA or Canada. As much as a single person can be said to generate a field, Cushing was the progenitor of neurosurgery. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Cushing was the product of a line of respected physicians of New England extraction. From his parents, he inherited a Puritan sense of mission, rectitude, and a remarkable dedication to work. Educated at Harvard Medical School, he sought post-graduate training at the epicenter of the revolution in American medical education that was Johns Hopkins University Hospital. At Hopkins he became a protege of Osler and started his surgical career under the direction of the outstanding and rather erratic William Halstead. Ambitious and remarkably diligent, Cushing set out to make his mark by pioneering an area of surgery avoided by other pioneering surgeons - brain surgery. A remarkably facile technical surgeon, Cushing was obsessed with improving all aspects of surgical care, including use of careful clinical diagnostic methods, improvement of anesthetic management, and post-operative care. Despite formidable obstacles, Cushing succeeded in creating a new discipline. His methods were adopted widely and his trainees became the founding neurosurgeons in many regions. Bliss gives a vivid impression of surgical practice in this period and of Cushing's innovations. To read these sections is to appreciate the remarkable progress made in the last century. At the end of his career, Cushing was pleased to attain 10% operative mortality for operations on intracranial tumors, a figure that seems horrifying today. Bliss is careful to note Cushing's considerable defects. He was a stringent, sometimes abusive preceptor. His ambition was manifested not only by his drive to do the utmost to improve clinical care but also by considerable arrogance. He inspired great loyalty but seems to have been respected rather than loved by many. He was a difficult husband and an absentee father. But while his relations with colleagues and trainees could be stormy, in his treatment of patients he appears to have behaved with compassion and tact. Bliss does a good job of putting Cushing's achievements in the context of broader developments. While Cushing became the most famous American surgeon with a substantial international reputation, other American surgeons, like Halstead, George Crile and the Mayo brothers, were producing substantial improvements in surgical practice. Its impossible to avoid comparing this book with the Osler book. In terms of scho