Every day throughout the world countless lives are saved by skilled surgeons, yet less than a century ago, surgery was little more than a desperate gamble, a last resort. Only through the pioneering work and research of such men as Harvey Cushing did the operating room change from a place of despair to one of hope.

Born in the Midwest in 1869, Harvey Cushing came from a family of physicians. He was on the verge of quitting medical school, when an older doctor convinced him it was his duty to spend his life fighting the kind of needless fatalities that had so shocked him.

His chosen path took Cushing to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he became more and more intrigued with the incredibly difficult challenges of brain surgery. He went to Europe to study the methods of the most noted doctors of the day. He endured agonizingly slow progress as he sought to perfect new surgical techniques. His skill and humanity were constantly tested by the terrible casualties of World War I. As time went on, he performed amazingly successful operations on the great and near-great of the world, as well as on the poor and humble.

This dedicated American doctor became the world's foremost brain surgeon, an acclaimed author, an advisor to Presidents and a man beloved even by those fellow doctors who had felt the sting of his impatience with anything less than perfection.

From the dust jacket