The Legacy of Harvey Cushing

A lavishly illustrated book on Cushing's pioneering career


Derived from Harvey Cushing's remarkable personal collection in the Brain Tumor Registry, The Legacy of Harvey Cushing: Profiles of Patient Care presents a stunning historical account of Cushing's surgical cases and research from 1905 to 1930.


This beautifully illustrated book features 800 of Cushing's surgical drawings and photographs of patients and tumor specimens. Preserved untouched for sixty years in the Yale University Library, the images provide the earliest catalog of neurological and neuropathological disease and reveal the techniques employed by the founder of modern neurosurgery. The editors have carefully integrated these high-quality photographs and illustrations into a compelling narrative constructed from patients' hospital records and Cushing's meticulous notes at preoperative and postoperative stages of management. Discharge notes, letters from the family of patients, photographs of patients (years after surgery), and death reports further humanize each clinical case and speak to Cushing's lasting dedication to his patients.


The book provides a glimpse of the extraordinary contribution that both Cushing and his patients made to the progress of neurological surgery in the twentieth century. This unique book will be prized by today's generation of neurological surgeons and neuropathologists.


A co-publication of Thieme and the American Association of Neurological Surgeons