Boldness based on deep understanding has marked Hopkins’ approach to nervous system disorders since the very beginning, when Harvey Cushing, the father of neurosurgery, attempted surgery for brain tumors at the turn of the 20th century. Studies he’d made of the brain’s circulation and of the way it reacts to injury let him whittle the going mortality, in a few short years, from nearly100 percent to less than 10 percent.
A half-decade later, when Hopkins neurologists and neurosurgeons came to understand that strokes, brain surgery and nerve-severing accidents present such distinct problems that only specialized intensive care can save patients, they went out on a limb to start the first true NCCU—neuro critical care unit—in the country. Today, strengthened by unusually quick melding of fundamental and clinical research, the treatment of major insults to the nervous system at The Johns Hopkins Hospital has led to mortality rates that are either the lowest or among the lowest anywhere.
