Science & Tech Quote by Harvey Cushing

Cushing frames modern medicine as a relay race disguised as a cavalry charge. Science is "in the saddle" - triumphant, forward-leaning, a little intoxicated with speed. The image flatters the era's breakthroughs while quietly puncturing its vanity: the riders get the cheers, but the work only matters if someone on the ground can steady the stirrup, tend the horses, and turn motion into impact.

The line "we are apt to forget" is doing real cultural work. It calls out a hierarchy that was hardening in Cushing's lifetime: prestige accruing to discovery, while application is treated as mere delivery. He borrows the moral gravity of "he also serves who waits" (a Milton echo) to dignify the less glamorous labor of implementation - clinical care, nursing, standardization, teaching, the slow translation of findings into protocols that actually reach patients. It's a rebuke aimed at the swagger of "breathless pace", a phrase that both celebrates progress and hints at its cost: acceleration that can outrun judgment, or leave whole institutions behind.

Context matters: Cushing helped invent modern neurosurgery, a field where technique and aftercare are inseparable from insight. He knew firsthand that breakthroughs don't walk into operating rooms on their own. The subtext is a plea for a fuller definition of scientific heroism - not just the lone genius on horseback, but the coordinated system that makes discovery survivable, repeatable, and humane.