Wilder Penfield - Biography

Biography

Penfield was born in Spokane, Washington (but spent most of his life in Hudson, Wisconsin) on January 25 or January 26, 1891. He studied at Princeton University where he played on the football team. After graduation in 1913, he was hired briefly as the coach. He then obtained a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he studied neuropathology under Sir Charles Scott Sherrington. He obtained his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University. He spent several years training at Oxford, where he met William Osler. He also studied in Spain, Germany, and New York.

After taking surgical apprenticeship under Harvey Cushing, he obtained a position at the Neurological Institute of New York, where he carried out his first solo operations against epilepsy. While in New York, he met David Rockefeller, who desired to endow an institute where Penfield could study the surgical treatment of epilepsy. However, academic politics among the New York neurologists prevented the establishment of this institute in New York; subsequently, Penfield was invited by Sir Vincent Meredith to Montreal in 1928. There, Penfield taught at McGill University and the Royal Victoria Hospital, becoming the city's first neurosurgeon.

In 1934 he founded and became the first Director of McGill University's world-famous Montreal Neurological Institute and the associated Montreal Neurological Hospital, which was established with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950. He retired in 1960 and turned his attention to writing, producing a novel as well as his autobiography, No Man Alone. (A later biography, Something Hidden, was written by his grandson, Jefferson Lewis.)

He was awarded the 1960 Lister Medal for his contributions to surgical science. The corresponding Lister Oration, given at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, was delivered on April 27, 1961, and was titled 'Activation of the Record of Human Experience'. In 1967 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 1994 he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. Much of his archival material is housed at the Osler Library of McGill University.

In his later years, Penfield dedicated himself to the public interest, particularly in support of university education. With his friends Governor-General Georges Vanier and Mrs. Pauline Vanier, née Archer, he co-founded the Vanier Institute of the Family, which Penfield helped found "to promote and guide education in the home -- man's first classroom." He was also an early proponent of bilingualism from childhood onward.

He died on April 5, 1976 of abdominal cancer at Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.