Laurels for Cushing

Harvey Cushing, a legendary figure in American medicine who began and ended his academic life at Yale, has been honored as one of the two most influential neurosurgeons of the 20th century. The Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) honored the 1891 Yale College alumnus as “Man of the Century, 1900-1949,” and devoted a recent cover of its journal to him and to M. Gazi Yasargil, a pioneer in cerebrovascular microsurgery who was trained by a protégé of Cushing’s pupil Hugh Cairns. Cushing’s one-time bursary student Lycurgus M. Davey, M.D. ’43 March, who helped catalog his collection of books in the late 1930s as a Yale undergraduate, was one of four authors who paid tribute to Cushing in the November 1999 issue of Neurosurgery. The journal’s editor, neurosurgeon Michael L.J. Apuzzo, M.D., HS ’73, also worked on the Cushing collection in 1958 as a Yale undergraduate. Yale professor Issam A. Awad, M.D., will become president of the 4,800-member CNS in November.