anniversary of the original description of the disease that turned outto be known as Cushing’s syndrome.Harvey Williams Cushing (April 8, 1869 — October 7, 1939) wasa renowned neurosurgeon at the inception of endocrinology, and is dis-tinguished today as the “father of modern neurosurgery”.A graduate of Yale College, Cushing spent most of his academic andprofessional life at Johns Hopkins and at Harvard Medical Schools, wherehis innovative and skilful approach to neurosurgery, introducing rigidhomeostasis, asepsis, electrocoagulation, and other technical procedures,reduced mortality rates from brain surgery from 50 to 10% (1).Cushing was puzzled by a 23-year-old patient that had central obe-sity with contrasting skinny arms and legs, presence of bruises and largepurplish striae spread upon a very thin, fragile, and almost translucent skin,a round and plethoric face resembling a “full moon”, prominent accumu-lation of dorsal fat, described as “buffalo hump”, in addition to hirsutism,amenorrhea, hypertension, and hyperglycemia.Although the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis and its intercon-nections were barely known at that time, Cushing described this astonish-ing condition as “pituitary basophilism”. Little was known about adrenalbiosynthesis and corticosteroid production by the “supra renal capsules”.Cortisol excess, either by primary adrenal production or secondaryto ACTH excess, and its resulting clinical manifestations are the quintes-sence of Cushing’s syndrome as we know it today. By 1912, however, lit-tle did Cushing know about these mechanisms when he published his ini-tial monograph: “The pituitary body and its disorders” (2), in which hedescribed the case of Minnie G., his first patient with typical stigmata ofhypercortisolism.However, it was not until 20 years later that Cushing gathered anoth-er eleven patients with similar clinical characteristics who were reported in1932 in a yet another seminal work: “Pituitary basophilism” (3).The florid clinical manifestations were ascertained to some sort ofpituitary abnormality called “basophilism”, even though only three of the12 reported patients were identified with a pituitary tumor. Indeed, in hislandmark report, Cushing unintentionally described what appears to be thefirst cases of a “polyglandular syndrome”, since at autopsy several cases alsopresented hyperplasia of the adrenal glands in association with pituitaryadenomas (3).Most interestingly, another patient from his series, with identicalmanifestations, had an adrenal adenoma found at autopsy, but no physio-logical relationship had been established. Only a few years later adrenaltumors were shown to cause the syndrome in some cases (4).