Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery

Extract

Harvey Williams Cushing was born in the city of Cleveland Ohio in 1869, the tenth child in a prosperous family that could already boast three generations of physicians. The Ohio branch of the Cushing clan traced their American family roots back to the early seventeenth century when their dissenter ancestors had landed in Boston and settled in the Massachusetts Bay colony. Over the next 250 years, as members of the family migrated further west, the New England Cushings displayed many of the characteristics often associated with what has been termed the Protestant work ethic, and by the early 1800s had begun to establish themselves as a family of doctors. Harvey enjoyed a privileged childhood in one of Cleveland's more fashionable neighbourhoods. After taking college entrance exams in Chicago in the spring of 1887, Harvey gained admission to Yale College in Connecticut, where three of his cousins had previously studied. In his masterful biography of Cushing, Michael Bliss describes the scene when the young Harvey left Cleveland to pursue his undergraduate studies.