Eleven Men in a Boston Hospital Room

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Neurosurgery became a specialty later than almost any other branch of surgery, because operating on the brain safely required advances the rest of medicine had not yet supplied: reliable anesthesia, real control of bleeding, and a working understanding of which part of the brain did what. The American College of Surgeons had, in October 1919, marked what is generally treated as the field's formal beginning. Five months after that, on 19 March 1920, eleven surgeons, most of them educators, gathered at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston at the invitation of Harvey Cushing and formed the Society of Neurological Surgeons, the first professional body devoted to the field in the United States. A second organization followed twelve years later: on 6 May 1932, twenty-three younger neurosurgeons met, also in Boston, to found what became the Harvey Cushing Society, later renamed the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. The two founding meetings, one for the established generation and one for the next, mark neurosurgery's passage from a handful of pioneers into an organized profession with a future beyond its founders.