The pioneering neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, who practiced medicine, from 1899 to 1932, was also a prolific documentarian. The Harvey Cushing Brain Tumor Registry, at Yale University, contains brain and brain-tumor specimens, slides, notes, and between ten thousand and fifteen thousand photo negatives of brain-tumor patients.
The negatives, which were discovered in the early nineties by a Yale graduate student in a medical-school basement, show the patients before and after their surgery. Many patients pose with their hands over their chest, allowing Cushing to document any deformities of the hands and fingers. “The only clinical imaging tools that Cushing could work with were the X-ray machine and the camera,” Terry Dagradi, the Cushing Center coördinator, told me. For Cushing, she said, “these photographs served the same purpose that MRIs serve today.”
The collection is still being evaluated, but Dagradi hopes to digitize it and upload the files to the Yale Medical School’s database. One outstanding question is who took all the photos for Cushing. “They were taken over more than thirty years so it’s unlikely that one person took all of them,” she said.
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