Pioneering neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing’s tumor registry included detailed records of eachbrain
Pioneering neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing’s tumor registry included detailed records of each patient, photographs of the patients, brains, and tumor samples. The collection, which had been stored in a basement room under the Harkness dormitory, is moving to a new home—the Cushing Center in the Cushing/Whitney Medical/Historical Library.
An article in a previous issue [“Cushing collection once again open for research,” Yale Medicine, Spring 2010] didn’t mention that prior to being housed in the basement of Harkness Dorm, the Cushing collection was stored in rooms in the basement next to the neuropathologist’s office down the hall from the morgue. While I was attending Derby High School, I worked as a mortician’s assistant to Frank and Walter in the morgue during the summers of the early 1950s. One of my jobs was to move the collection to the rooms beneath Harkness. I will never forget loading the jars containing the specimens onto the gurneys and wheeling them through the tunnel to their new destination.
Walter W. Karney, M.D. ’62
Professor Emeritus of Medicine
Uniformed Services University
School of Medicine
Rockville, Md.
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