Dr. Harvey Cushing

Over the story for you from the files of the reader's digest, the man on the operating table was suffering from a tumor on the brain. Swiftly the surgeon and newly graduated in turn went to work. A few hours later, the patient died.

It came as a surprise to no one for the year was 1895, and in those days, nine out of ten patients failed to survive brain surgery. Twenty-five years later, the young in turn had reversed the arts. Nine out of ten patients survived brain operations. His name, Dr Harvey Cushing, As an undergraduate at Yale, he was a good but uninspired student, but in medical school

in surgery he found his true vocation and yet because of an experience in medical school, Cushing almost gave up medicine. It was regular practice for second year students to administer ether, and Cushing had served in that capacity only a few times when one of his patients died in the middle of an operation.

He blamed himself and decided to give up being a doctor. Only the arguments of friends finally made him change his mind. When pushing the hung up his shingle in Baltimore, his salary as staff physician at a hospital was just $350 a year.

Hoping to augment it, the 32-year-old surgeon requested that all cases at Johns Hopkins in which brain surgery was indicated be referred to him. It was only a trickle at first, for doctors almost universally regarded a brain operation as a sentence of death.

But as Cushing's brain tumor mortality rate kept dropping, more and more cases came to him, and almost single-handed he had created a new surgical specialty. After America's entry into World War I, Dr. Cushing was commissioned a major and took a surgical team overseas.