Harvey Cushing's Canadian connections

Abstract

During his surgical career between 1896 and 1934, Harvey Cushing made eight visits to Canada. He had a broad impact on Canadian medicine and neurosurgery. Cushing's students Wilder Penfield and Kenneth McKenzie became outstanding leaders of the two major centers in Canada for neurosurgical treatment and training. On his first trip to Canada, shortly after completing his surgical internship in August 1896, Cushing traveled with members of his family through the Maritime Provinces and visited hospitals in Quebec and Montreal. Eight years later, in February 1904, as a successful young neurosurgeon at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, he reported to the Montreal Medico-Chirurgical Society on his surgical experience in 20 cases of removal of the trigeminal ganglion for neuralgia. In 1922, as the Charles Mickle Lecturer at the University of Toronto, Cushing assigned his honorarium of $1000 to support a neurosurgical fellowship at Harvard. This was awarded to McKenzie, then a general practitioner, for a year's training with Cushing in 1922-1923. McKenzie returned to initiate the neurosurgical services at the Toronto General Hospital, where he developed into a master surgeon and teacher. On Cushing's second visit to McGill University in October 1922, he and Sir Charles Sherrington inaugurated the new Biology Building of McGill's Medical School, marking the first stage of a Rockefeller-McGill program of modernization. In May 1929, Cushing attended the dedication of the Osler Library at McGill. In September 1934, responding to the invitation of Penfield, Cushing presented a Foundation Lecture-one of his finest addresses on the philosophy of neurosurgery-at the opening of the Montreal Neurological Institute. On that same trip, Cushing's revisit to McGill's Osler Library convinced him to turn over his own treasure of historical books to Yale University.