The human brain is a very complex thing and till date, science is still learning new things about it. Nevertheless, we have learned a great deal about it, not least from the works of figures such as Wilder Penfield who, at one time in his life, was considered the greatest living Canadian.
Biography of Wilder Penfield
The neurosurgeon was born Wilder Graves Penfield on January 26, 1891, in the United States, in Spokane, Washington. He was raised primarily alongside his brother and sister by his mother, as his father was estranged from him. They moved to Hudson, Wisconsin, away from their father after his parents’ marriage was annulled. Even though his relationship with his father was estranged, it’s easy to see how Wilder ended up in the medical profession. His father worked in the medical profession just like his grandfather, so it’s no surprise that Wilder chose the same path when he went to Princeton University, where he also had an interest in athletics.
Thanks to a Rhodes scholarship, he was able to study neuropathology under Nobel laureate Sir Charles Scott Sherrington at Merton College, Oxford. From there he would much later go to Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where he would earn a medical degree. He then studied in different countries, including Germany and New York, before taking up a position at the New York Neurological Institute. It was there that he performed his first operation to treat epilepsy. In 1928, he moved to Montreal, Quebec, where he became the city’s first neurosurgeon.
As a brain surgeon, he performed brain surgery on his only sister Ruth who was suffering from brain cancer. Although the complex operation added more than a year to his life, he was unable to save her.
Who was he
Wilder Penfield was, as noted, a neurosurgeon whose work on the brain helped pave the way for understanding not only the structure of the brain, but also its functions.
More so, his work on the brain has to this day been considered something close to science fiction. Through this, there is an understanding of epilepsy along with other dysfunctions leading to memory problems as well as speech disorders.
He founded the Montreal Neurological Institute.William Cone in 1934. In 1950 he was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Why was he considered the “best living Canadian”?
The first time successful brain surgery to remove a tumor was performed in the United States was in 1888 by a man known as William Williams Keen. Many years later, nothing looked like a map of the brain and its functions. That was until the 1920s when Wilder Penfield, in an effort to come up with an approach to treat epilepsy, came up with a method to remove part of a patient’s skull while still awake. The operation, known as the Montreal procedure, was performed so that the epileptic patient could identify the source of the condition.
Penfield would open the patient’s skullHe then probed different areas of the brain for which he receives feedback from the patient. Thanks to this, he was able to know that epilepsy is caused by the scarred or damaged region of brain tissue.
Before people with epilepsy have a seizure, they would first have a sensation which can be in the form of smell, taste or even thought, and so through the method introduced by Penfield, the area of the brain that results could be located and then deleted.
Not only did the work open a new door to treating epilepsy, but it also led to a better understanding of the human brain and its functions. That’s because Wilder also drew a map of the brain indicating which parts of the brain could cause numbness, affect movement, or even affect speech.
Wilder Penfield’s work has also helped to understand that there are physical structures in the brain for memory, as there are areas that when affected can experience detailed memory loss.
Although he was born American, he did most of his work and discoveries in Canada and because of this he was granted Canadian citizenship in 1934 and was celebrated as a national hero. Much later, he was considered “the greatest living Canadian”.