BIGOTRY AND RACISM IN AMERICA: WHAT HARVEY LEFT US
Dan Agin
Huffington Post
July 20 2009
Grandchildren are prone to think of the lives of their grandparents
as ancient history, a collection of sentimental anecdotes of no use in
deciding what slogan to put on your tee-shirt. But history is history,
it’s our history, and before we argue about the way things should
be it’s wise to understand the way things were and how we got to
where we are now. After watching elected representatives of Alabama
and South Carolina badger an Hispanic woman who has more gumption,
class, and intelligence in one of her little fingers than they have
in their whole heads, I started thinking about Harvey Cushing, the
great neurosurgeon at Harvard who did so much to poison us with his
bigotry and racism, it’s a wonder we’re still here.
In 1901, the renowned neurophysiologist and future Nobel Prize
laureate Charles Sherrington, while he was a professor in Liverpool,
was visited by a young American named Harvey Cushing, a neurosurgeon
at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Gracious as always with guests,
Sherrington showed 32-year-old Cushing his animals and talked about his
experiments. He allowed Cushing three weeks in his laboratory. Neither
man knew that Cushing was destined to become the foremost neurosurgeon
in the world.
>From Cushing’s letters to his parents, it’s apparent he was hardly
impressed with Sherrington. Was he offended by Sherrington’s middle
class origins? Cushing was in fact a dedicated snob, more impressed
with one of Sherrington’s gorillas than with Sherrington. Cushing wrote
to his mother in America about the gorilla in Sherrington’s laboratory:
"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."
In later years, Harvey Cushing, a famous surgeon in his post at Harvard
University, would be one of the major forces in American medicine
restricting the entry of blacks, Jews, and Italians into American
medical schools. (See the book by Michael Bliss: Harvey Cushing:
A Life in Surgery, Oxford University Press, 2005.)
Cushing was particularly opposed to the hiring of Jews in medical
departments. In 1925, he objected to having three Jews on his staff
at Brigham Hospital in Boston. He wrote in a letter: "I have no
objections to Hebrews, but I do not like too many of them all at once."
Cushing was even opposed to the hiring of black nurses in municipal
hospitals, and in 1929 he wrote to Cleveland’s director of public
health and welfare: "I am sure that colored women would often
make excellent trained nurses as they have shown themselves to be
excellent nursery maids. But this will mean that colored men who
are their friends and visitors will have to appear at the nurses’
parties and receptions and this would be absolutely disastrous to
the whole social status of your training school."
In 1938, Cushing was apparently more horrified by the method of the
Nazi extermination of the Jews than by the extermination itself. He
wrote in a letter, "What sticks in my craw is the Nazi treatment of
the Jews. It would be almost better, it seems to me, to exterminate
them as the Turks attempted to exterminate the Armenians."
Cushing was not a Southerner but a Northerner, born and raised in
Cleveland in a long line of physicians that first settled in Cleveland
in 1835. Aside from his skills as a surgeon, it seems Cushing was
a hardened bigot and racist — in effect, a moral imbecile. Was he
merely a man of his time? He apparently had insufficient intelligence
to rise above the ugly prejudices of that time. It’s difficult to
imagine that a physician with such strong aversions could isolate
such aversions from his treatment of patients.
We live in a strange country. We have so much diversity in America,
it can hardly be cataloged. And yet of all advanced countries in the
world, we excel in tribal hatreds that apparently seep everywhere in
the American psyche. We babble about "core values" while we do our
best to ignore the festering rot that underlies those values. It’s
a rot left to us by people like Harvey Cushing — and a rot that
still bubbles in too many people in our South, and in the politicians
elected by those people.
I wish a time will come for us when politicians of our South will
no longer remind us of people like Harvey Cushing. Some people might
think it’s much better to forget the past, but I don’t agree. We need
the past to inform us why we’re the way we are. Without that we will
never change. And without change our hatreds may eventually destroy us.