Arthur Robertson Cushny, 1866-1926 / [Sir Henry H. Dale].

  • Dale, Henry H. (Henry Hallett), 1875-1968.
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Arthur Robertson Cushny, 1866-1926 / [Sir Henry H. Dale]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    1866-1926. Arthur Robertson Cushny, who died suddenly on February 24th of this year, was not only the leading Pharmacologist of Great Britain, but a figure of truly international importance in the world of experi¬ mental medecine. The fourth son of a Scottish clergyman, he was born at Fochabers, Morayshire, on March 6th, 1866. He passed from the local school to Aberdeen University, where he took the degree of M. A. in 1886. He had by this time already entered as a student of medecine at the Marischal College, the medical school of Aberdeen, and in 1889 he graduated M. B., C. M., with the highest honours. Cushny did not, as some hâve done, become a Pharmacologist by acci¬ dent of opportunity. It seems rather that the teaching of John Théodore Cash, who survives him in honoured retirement, aroused his interest in the subject, and determined his deliberate choice of it for his life’s work. To that choice he was able to give immédiate efîect, when, being awarded the George Thompson Fellowship in the year of his medical graduation, he left for the Continent, to study with Kronecker in Berne, in Würzburg, and finally with Schmiedeberg in Strassburg. He was assitant to Schmiedeberg from 1892 to 1893, and his reverence for that pioneer of modem Pharmacology was shown in his subséquent dedication of his own great Text-Book « dem Meister vom Schüler ». Cushny left Strassburg for the Chair of Pharmacology in the University of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where for twelve years, between the âges of 27 and 39, in a growing centre of medical science, he passed what he has himself described as the « formative » period of his life. It was there, indeed, that he carried out in association with his pupils the investigations on the heart-beat and on the action of digitalis which hâve already obtained classical rank, and there, too, that he wrote his great Text-Book of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, the first really comprehensive book in any language to deal with the subject primarily from the experimental side. At Ann Arbor also he began the study of the influence of optical isomerism on pharmacological activity. In 1905 University College, London, decided to found a new Chair of Experimental Pharmacology. Previously the teaching in that subject had been given by one of the physicians attached to the associated