Harvey Williams Cushing

Born Apr. 8, 1869, in Cleveland; died Oct. 7, 1939, in New Haven. American neurosurgeon, member of the National Academy of Sciences (1914) and the New York Medical Academy (1926).

Cushing received his medical education at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. In 1912 he became a professor there. In 1933 he became a professor of neurology at Yale University in New Haven. His principal works deal with the most important problems of brain surgery and are closely related to physiological investigation: study of the hypophysis, intracranial pressure, meningeal tumors, and electrosurgery of the brain. Cushing proved that the elevation of intracranial fluid pressure leads to the compensatory elevation of vascular pressure (Cushing’s law). He developed a number of neurosurgical methods, including temporal decompression (1905) and a procedure for access to the posterior cranial fossa. He described basophilic adenoma of the pituitary (Cushing’s disease). He was president of a number of American scientific societies and an honorary member of many foreign scientific societies.