Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, USA, 2005 - Biography & Autobiography - 591 pages
Here is the first biography to appear in fifty years of Harvey Cushing, a giant of American medicine and without doubt the greatest figure in the history of brain surgery.Drawing on new collections of intimate personal and family papers, diaries and patient records, Michael Bliss captures Cushing's professional and his personal life in remarkable detail. Bliss paints an engaging portrait of a man of ambition, boundless, driving energy, a fanatical work ethic, a penchant for self-promotion and ruthlessness, more than a touch of egotism and meanness, and an enormous appetite for life. Equally important, Bliss traces the rise of American surgery as seen through the eyes of one of its pioneers. The book describes how Cushing, working in the early years of the 20th century, developed remarkable new techniques that let surgeons open the skull, expose the brain, and attack tumors--all with a much higher rate of success than previously known. Indeed, Cushing made the miraculous in surgery an everyday event, as he and his team compiled an astonishing record of treating more than two thousand tumors.This is the definite Cushing biography, an epic narrative of high surgical adventure, capturing the highs and lows of an extraordinary life.

From inside the book

Contents

The Surgeon and the General
3
The Cushings of Cleveland
11
Making a Yale Man
34
Copyright

15 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2005)

John William Michael Bliss was born in Leamington, Ontario, Canada on January 18, 1941. He graduated from the University of Toronto. He taught at the University of Toronto from 1968 until 2006. He was a historian of Canadian business and politics as well as medicine. He wrote 14 books during his lifetime including A Canadian Millionaire, The Discovery of Insulin, Banting: A Biography, William Osler: A Life in Medicine, and Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery. He was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in 2016. He died from complications of vasculitis, an inflammatory blood vessel disease, on May 18, 2017 at the age of 76.

Bibliographic information