page_title: Harvey Cushing
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Harvey Cushing / Career / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Cushing cannula is a Inox needle for cerebral ventricular puncture
context_page_description: Harvey Williams Cushing was an American neurosurgeon, pathologist, writer, and draftsman. A pioneer of brain surgery, he was the first exclusive neurosurgeon and the first person to describe Cushing's disease. He wrote a biography of William Osler in three volumes.
context_section_description: In the beginning of the 20th century, Dr. Cushing developed many of the basic surgical techniques for operating on the brain.  This established him as one of the foremost leaders and experts in the field.  Under his influence neurosurgery became a new and autonomous surgical discipline.
  He considerably improved the survival of patients after difficult brain operations for intracranial tumors.
  He used X-rays to diagnose brain tumors.
  He used electrical stimuli for study of the human sensory cortex.
  He played a pivotal role in development of the Bovie electrocautery tool with William T. Bovie, a physicist.
  He was the world's leading teacher of neurosurgeons in the first decades of the 20th century.
  Arguably, Cushing's greatest contribution came with his introduction to North America of blood pressure measurement.  Upon visiting colleague Scipione Riva-Rocci, an Italian physician, Cushing was astonished by Riva-Rocci's non-invasive way of measuring intra-arterial pressure.  In 1896, Riva-Rocci developed a wall-mounted mercury manometer linked to a balloon-inflated cuff that would measure the pressure needed to compress arterial systolic pressure, i.e. systolic blood pressure measurement.  Riva-Rocci's design was based on a more primitive version developed by French physician Pierre Potain.  Cushing returned to the US with a sample of Riva-Rocci's sphygmomanometer and blood pressure measurement became a vital sign.  The use of the Riva-Rocci sphygmomanometer as a diagnostic tool rapidly spread across the US and western world, a direct contribution by Harvey Cushing.  The device's use continued until Russian physician Nikolai Korotkov included diastolic blood pressure measurement in 1905 (after he discovered the famed "Korotkoff sounds") with his improved sphygmomanometer, which also replaced the mercury manometer with a smaller, round dial manometer.
   Cushing's name is commonly associated with his most famous discovery, Cushing's disease. In 1912 he reported in a study an endocrinological syndrome caused by a malfunction of the pituitary gland which he termed "polyglandular syndrome." He published his findings in 1932 as "The Basophil Adenomas of the Pituitary Body and Their Clinical Manifestations: pituitary Basophilism".
  Cushing was also awarded the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for a book recounting the life of one of the fathers of modern medicine, Sir William Osler. In 1930, Cushing was awarded the Lister Medal for his contributions to surgical science. As part of the award, he delivered the Lister Memorial Lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in July 1930. Cushing was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1934, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He served as president of the History of Science Society in 1934. Cushing was also a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, nominated at least 38 times.
  The World War II Liberty Ship SS Harvey Cushing was named in his honor.
  In 1988, the United States Postal Service issued a 45-cent postage stamp in his honor, as part of the Great Americans series.
  Cushing developed many surgical instruments that are in use today, most notably Cushing forceps and the Cushing ventricular cannula. The forceps instrument is used to grasp the thick tissues of the scalp during cranial surgery and the cannula is used to enter the brain ventricles for CSF drainage. He also developed a surgical magnet while working with the Harvard Medical Unit in France during World War I to extract shrapnel from the heads of wounded soldiers.
  The Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University contains extensive collections in the field of medicine and the history of medicine. Cushing's long-time personal secretary, Madeline Stanton, played a major role in organizing his rare book donations, along with those from John F. Fulton and Arnold C. Klebs, to form the library. In 2005, the library released portions of its collection online, including the Peter Parker Collection which consists of a collection of portrait engraving
caption: Cushing ventricular cannula
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