Harvey Cushing

The author of The Discovery of Insulin chronicles the professional and personal life of Harvey Cushing, a giant of American medicine and the greatest figure in the history of brain surgery.

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.

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.

In his time the most famous physician in the world, Canadian-born William Osler (1849-1919) is still the best-known figure in the history of medicine. This new, definitive biography by Michael Bliss is the first full-scale life of Osler to appear since 1925. An award-winning medical historian, Bliss draws on many untapped sources to recreate Osler's life and medical times for a new generation of readers. Born at Bond Head, north of Toronto, Osler rose from obscurity to become the greatest medical teacher and writer in three countries. At Canada's McGill University, America's Johns Hopkins University, and finally as regius professor at Oxford, Osler was idolized by two generations of medical students and practitioners, for whom he came to personify the ideal doctor. His quest was to bring high standards and scientific methods into general practice in the medical world and to give teaching hospitals a solid place in the education of doctors. The publication of his book, The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892), established him as the authority of modern medicine, a position he held well into the new century. Osler was revered as the high priest of the advent of twentieth-century medicine. In this fine biography, Michael Bliss animates the epic quality of Osler's life - not only in telling his personal story, but in setting that story against the dramatic backdrop of the coming of modern medicine. Winner of the Jason A. Hannah Medal, awarded by the Royal Society of Canada and the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine