The magician with a meningioma.

Abstract

N early a century ago, Karl Germain (1878-1956), a magician who had an international reputation for conjuring, became blind from a brain tumor. It ended his career. His physicians in Cleveland, Ohio, advised him to consult the eminent neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, MD (1869-1939), in Boston, Massachusetts. Cushing successfully removed the tumor and reported the case in his landmark article on meningiomas arising from the tuberculum sellae published in the first issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology in 1929. Germain is case number 1 in this publication. Cushing’s description of the tumor earned him the Hermann Knapp Medal of the Section on Ophthalmology from the American Medical Association, named in honor of the founder of the Archives of Ophthalmology. Cushing described Germain again in his most important medical book, Meningiomas, which was the culmination of decades of work and was not published until 1938, the next to last year of Cushing’s life.