Boris Karloff - Dr. Harvey Cushing

0:00This 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

1:04earth 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

2:09team 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

3:15want 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

4:16until then this is Boris Kahloff saying goodbye.