Boris Karloff - Dr. Harvey Cushing

This is Boris Karloff speaking. I'm here with a story for you from the files of the reader's

digest. The man on the operating table was suffering from a tumour on the brain. Swiftly

the surgeon and newly graduated didn't turn went to work. A few hours later the patient

died. It came as a surprise to no one. For the year was 1895. And in those days nine

out of ten patients failed to survive brain surgery. Twenty-five years later the young

intern had reversed the odds. Nine out of ten patients survived brain operations. His

name Dr. Harvey Cushing as an undergraduate at Yale he was a good but uninspired student.

But in medical school in surgery he found his true vocation and yet because of an experience

in medical school Cushing almost gave up medicine. It was regular practice for secondary

earth students to administer ether and Cushing had served in that capacity only a few times

when one of his patients died in the middle of an operation. He blamed himself and decided

to give up being a doctor. Only the arguments of friends finally made him change his mind.

In Cushing hung up his shingle in Baltimore his salary and staff physician at a hospital

was just $350 a year. Hoping to augment it the 32-year-old surgeon requested that all

cases at Johns Hopkins in which brain surgery was indicated be referred to him. It was

only a trickle at first for doctors almost universally regarded a brain operation as a

sentence of death. But as Cushing's brain tumor mortality rate kept dropping more and

more cases came to him and almost single-handed he had created a new surgical specialty. After

America's entry into World War I Dr. Cushing was commissioned a major and took a surgical

team overseas. At home he had considered a single brain operation a full day's work but

at the front he tackled as many as eight a day operating by candlelight when air alerts

had shut off the power. In August 1980 in the shadow theory Cushing came down with an

obscure infection of the nervous system. After the armistice he returned to this country

and slowly, painfully his fingers regained their skill. He was never able to walk easily

again. But Dr. Cushing was as busy as ever. His surgical technique was still advancing though

sometimes he operated sitting down. In a lifetime of brilliant accomplishment Harvey Cushing

was showered with international honors but he was first of all the friend of sick people

in that time of trouble. He could command astronomical fees from the wealthy but a patient

of limited means might find enclosed with Dr. Cushing's modest bill a note. I don't

want you to feel bound to pay this account unless you can really manage to do so but if

you can pay it or can pay part of it in due course I'll be obliged to you. I found

the story of Dr. Harvey Cushing in the back files of the readers digest but in the current

December issue of the magazine there's the story of another immortal man of medicine.

He day owned a Gucci, diseased detective extraordinary. Now if Sherlock Holmes had been

lured into a fatal trap by a suspect in his greatest case his end would have been comparable

to the martyrdom of the Rockefeller Institute's incomparable diseased detective. For

a Gucci died of yellow fever in West Africa the victim of a murderous microorganism that

he had tracked halfway around the world himself. The whole story is in the December issue

of the readers digest. I'll be joining you soon again with more transcribed stories but

until then this is Boris Kahloff saying goodbye.