Content area
Full text
Michael Bliss, Harvey Gushing: a life in surgery. New York, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. xii, 591, illus., $40.00 (hardback 0-19-516989-1).
Anyone who has read John Fulton's biography of Harvey Gushing (1869-1939), or dug through the mountains of Cushing's surviving papers, will appreciate Michael Bliss's study, Harvey Cushing: a life in surgery. Bliss, with that characteristic verve and detailed finesse which distinguished his earlier biography of William Osier, has produced yet another fine portrait that will delight various audiences. Although historians of medicine will undoubtedly have more to add about Cushing's life and legacy, there can be no denying that this volume reveals much about the life of this American surgeon and scholar.
Given the extent of the archival collections from Cushing's life, it is amazing how little historical attention has been paid to him as a figure, and to what his papers reveal about modem American medicine. Other than a few edited books, an excellent dissertation by Ock-Joo Kim, and several scholarly articles, the major secondary sources on Cushing have remained the 1946 "official biography" by Fulton and Elizabeth Thomson's 1950...