The sociopolitical pendulum has swung left. It’s about time; we have had some four decades of conservative politics in the U.S., from the mid-1970s to the mid 20-teens. These lines are never clearly drawn, but there is an essential truth to the notion that the prevailing political winds sway side-to-side. I am not favoring the right or the left here, merely stating a fact. Just going back to the beginning of the 20th century in this country shows how these oscillations occur. The first decade-and-a-half of the 1900s saw a strong move towards socialism; then there was World War I (and the Spanish flu pandemic, conveniently repressed in our collective memory), followed by the conservative roaring 20s. Then, the Depression and a return to the left and the New Deal; then WW II followed by the Eisenhower 50s, a paradigm of stultifying conservatism in the minds of the 60s leftists; then the “Reagan Revolution”, the rightward swing that we now seem to be moving away from as a society. Of course, outside events (such as the current pandemic) influence these shifts, but they have an internal dynamic of their own.
The current moment is often compared to the movement of the 1960s, for good or ill, depending on who is making the analogy. There are obvious parallels: protests related to African-American inequality, calls for a socialist economy, denouncements of the police and others. But, some things are different, including the multiplying force of electronic communications in general and social media in particular. Fifty plus years ago, no statues were being torn down, or previously revered historical figures denounced. We are witness to the rise of what has been labeled “cancel culture.” Now, this is a term applied by those on the right to deride actions and views on the left that they find noxious. Regardless, there is no question that individuals have lost jobs and that prominent institutions have been renamed because of associations with views deemed insufficiently “woke.”
What does any of this have to do with neurosurgery? Well, the person we revere as the founder of our field held views regarding members of ethnic minorities, especially African-Americans and Jews, that would get him summarily fired today. Yes, I am talking Harvey Cushing here. Here he is in a letter describing a gorilla in the laboratory of Charles Sherrington, the eminent English neurophysiologist, in 1901: “Coal black – I don’t believe you could have distinguished his ear from a darkies [sic]. He smelled just like a dirty Negro – behaved like one.” And complaining in 1925 about Jews on the hospital staff: “I have no objections to Hebrews, but I do not like too many of them all at once.” Other examples abound. And Cushing held and expressed such views at a time when many people had risen above them – including his own revered mentor, William Osler.
So what do we do with our racist and anti-Semitic founding father (whose social views did not affect his surgical and clinical care of Black or Jewish patients)? Does he go the way of the Confederate generals? The answer is no, and here’s why:
Those Confederate statues were commissioned for public spaces for the express purpose of intimidating Black Americans a generation after the Civil War and Emancipation. The generals and others depicted were being celebrated because of their defense of slavery. When we honor the memory of Harvey Cushing with our publications, presentations, commemorations, etc. we are not praising him for his bigoted views that were already widely viewed as unacceptable when he said them. We are celebrating his brilliance as a surgical innovator, his drive and how he more or less created our profession. We must continue to understand and accept human frailties and inconsistencies, and that good and bad coexist pretty much in everyone. The challenge for each of us is to make the good predominate.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whose son was married, for a time, to Cushing’s daughter) famously said of a Central American dictator: “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.” So there we have Harvey Cushing, founder of neurosurgery: our SOB.
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