The Cult of Doctors: Harvey Cushing and the Religious Culture of Modern Medicine

Harvey Cushing had an extraordinary life in medicine as an innovative brain surgeon and a pivotal figure in the biomedical revolutions taking place at the turn of the twentieth century. Expressions of sincere devotion from Cushing’s patients often rely on distinctly religious language to capture the meaning and impact of the doctor in their lives. If these devotional sentiments from former patients were the only traces of religious meaning associated with the life of Cushing, they could easily be discounted as an all-too-common, and some might say particularly confused, infusion of personal spirituality into the realm of medicine and health. But these expressions of adoration and veneration may be only the proverbial tip of a deep, wide, and largely unseen religious iceberg. Cushing’s extraordinary accomplishments did inspire both patients and the public in this era, but it is proposed that his life is embedded in a much larger and more significant religious movement driving the cultural success and power of biomedical science: the cult of doctors. Gary Laderman, Ph.D., is a cultural historian who has written two books on death in America, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford UP, 2003) and The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883 (Yale UP, 1996). His PhD is in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is working on a new book project that explores the intersections of religion and medicine in the twentieth century. This is the first article from that project.