| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael Bliss. Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 591. $40.00.

In 1999 Michael Bliss published a major biography of William Osler, the revered Canadian physician who transformed American clinical teaching in medicine before leaving the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to become Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. Osler had never lacked for biographers. Indeed, the major Osler biography before Bliss was written by one of the doctor's most sincere admirers, neurosurgical pioneer Harvey Cushing. In 1925, six years after Osler's death, Cushing published a two-volume homage to his mentor and teacher. Cushing's A Life of Sir William Osler (a staggering 1,371-page book, which prompted one of the author's colleagues to joke that it was three times as long as the standard biography of Louis Pasteur and twice as long as a recent biography of Christ) received the Pulitzer Prize, one of many distinctions the neurosurgeon would garner in his lifetime. As Bliss immersed himself in the details and records of Osler's life, he continued to encounter Cushing, came to realize the rich archival materials relating to Cushing's friendship with Osler, and to explore the details of the neurosurgeon's professional and personal life. By the time he had completed the Osler biography, Bliss explains, he "had realized that it would require a sequel, a biography of Cushing" (p. xi). Perhaps fortunately for both the author and the reader, Cushing, unlike Osler, was not a saint, but a sinner; Bliss characterizes Cushing variously as hard-driving, egotistical, and mean, grants that the neurosurgeon was "perhaps more human than Osler," and at the same time concludes that Cushing was not only "more talented and more driven" than Osler, he was "certainly more American."

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