The Surgical Art of Harvey Cushing

Neurosurgical Classics , by Robert H. Wilkins, 523 pp, with illus, $85, ISBN 1-879284-09-X, Park Ridge, Ill, American Association of Neurological Surgeons, 1992. It was the custom of America's first great neurosurgeon, Harvey Cushing, to make sketches of important stages in every operation he carried out, which were entered into the chart as soon as his part was concluded. He had a considerable native talent, fostered by medical artist Max Brodel, with whom he worked at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital before becoming neurosurgeon-in-chief at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. These sketches were worked up into finished drawings for publication, for many years by one of Brodel's pupils, Mildred Codding. The current chief of neurosurgery at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Peter McL. Black, has cooperated in an effort to save as many of the old records of the Cushing neurosurgical cases as possible, aided by the former chief