20 Haunting Medical Portraits Of Harvey Cushing’s Patients In The Early 20th Century

Born on the 8th of April, 1869, in Cleveland, Ohio, Dr. Harvey Cushing was one of the most prominent people in the history of neurosurgery. Considered to be the pioneer in the field, he not only performed countless operations, but took notes on them meticulously, which added to an impressive collection of neuroscience research at its early stages.

Discussing Cushing’s input in the world of neuroscience, Cohen and Gadal wrote: “For Cushing to achieve the dream of establishing and spreading his specialty through his disciples, he needed to first prove the safety of his methods. His patients therefore became the center of his career and their stories, which he carefully recorded, became the diary of neurological surgery in its infancy.”

According to a research paper on Cushing’s life and work, the father of modern neurosurgery was the youngest of ten children, who came from a family well-rooted in the world of medicine: his father, grandfather and even his great-grandfather were all general medical practitioners. With such a pedigree, it’s not surprising that Cushing, too, entered the world of medicine, graduating from Yale University in 1891, and receiving a medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1895.

Said research paper pointed out that the details surrounding Cushing’s life and his work are particularly well documented, since he was keen on writing letters and keeping records. 

A study of some of Cushing’s notes found that he had copious documentation of his own surgical mishaps as well as suggestions on how to prevent such accidents from happening in the future.

Some mistakes the surgeon documented included errors of judgment—such as the time he reportedly operated on the wrong side of a patient’s brain—as well as cases classified as “human error,” entailing such mishaps as dropping an instrument into a wound.

At the age of 33, Cushing became an associate in charge of neurological surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. That’s where he worked with trigeminal neuralgia—a condition that causes sudden and severe pain in one’s face—and began operating on brain tumor patients.

In addition to that, he became increasingly interested in the pituitary gland—a pea-sized gland located at the base of the brain—and would spend countless hours working on it both in the operating room and the laboratory. Such effort eventually led him to becoming a global authority figure in regards to matters related to trigeminal neuralgia, brain tumors, and diseases of the pituitary gland.

Due to his prominent work in the field of medicine, Dr. Henry Cushing’s name can be found not only in all sorts of books and documents, but among the list of diseases, too. A condition (now known as Cushing's disease or Cushing's syndrome) that occurs when the body makes too much of the hormone called cortisol was named after the renowned surgeon, as he was arguably the first one to describe it, when he described a patient with hypercorticism back in 1912.

While his input in the development of medicine is evident, it came at a price; some sources suggest that his devotion to neurosurgery pushed Cushing away from his family.

The surgeon would often have to leave his wife—Betsey M. Williams, who he married in 1852—and kids for long periods of time or would spend time studying and working on his notes. According to the Journal of Medical Humanities, Hektoen International, Cushing did take the time to do appendectomies on two of his kids and removed a tubercular lymph node from another.

“His oldest son died in an alcohol-related car crash; another son flunked out of Yale. One of his daughters married a son of Franklin Roosevelt. The marriages of his three daughters all ended in divorce. During his last years, Cushing was often alone and in poor health,” a piece in the magazine read in part.

While it is believed that Cushing didn’t have that close of a relationship with his children, one of them—his daughter, Betsey Cushing Whitney—was the one to invest in a legacy commemorating her father, Yale’s medical library, opened back in 1941.

Cushing was reportedly the driving force persuading Yale University officials to open a medical library, which would be the heart of the medical school, where old and new collections would be equally accessible. Unfortunately, the neurosurgeon died on October 7, 1939 just days after learning that the funds to build the medical library had been allocated.

In 1990, Betsey Cushing Whitney—the widow of the former US Ambassador to the United Kingdom and publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, John Hay Whitney—donated $8 million dollars for a renovation and expansion of the library. The edifice was then renamed the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.