Wilder Penfield

Wilder Graves Penfield, OM, CC, CMG, FRS (born 26 January 1891 in Spokane / Washington, † April 5, 1976 in Montreal), a pupil of Charles Sherrington, was a US-born Canadian neurosurgeon.

Life

Penfield was the son of a physician, but whose practice was received, whereupon the mother with the children to her parents in Hudson ( Wisconsin) moved. He studied at Princeton University, where he excelled in wrestling and American football, with the completion of 193 From 1914 he studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford ( and coached in between the end of his studies to earn money, the Princeton football team ). He studied there with Charles Sherrington, who sparked his interest in neurology, and the Canadian Regius Professor William Osler, in whose house he was recovering after his ship ( he was serving in a hospital of the Red Cross in France do ) in the English Channel in 1916 victims a German U -boat attack was and sank. He continued his studies at Johns Hopkins University, where he in 1918 his MD Statements made ​​. He then began his residency training at the brain surgeon Harvey Cushing at the Peter Bent Brigham as Internal Hospital in Boston. Then he returned once a year in Oxford Sherrington and researched after a year in London at the National Hospital in the field of neurology. He was also to study in Spain and Germany ( including among Otfrid Foerster )

In 1921 he returned back to the U.S., struck a lucrative offer as a surgeon at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit to continue his research in addition to his surgical work and went to the Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University, where he studied with the surgeon Allen O. Whipple and his first epilepsy surgeries performed.

In 1928 he was invited by Vincent Meredith ( a philanthropist and founder of the Bank of Montreal) at McGill University in Montreal to found an institute with the aim of working together in the neurosurgeons, neurologists and pathologists and research could, giving him in New York had failed because of the opposition of the New York neurologist. At the same time he was the first neurosurgeon in Montreal at the Royal Victoria Hospital. In 1934 he was able to establish with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Montreal Institute of Neurology. In 1954 he went as professor to retire, but remained until 1960 Director of the Institute. He also gave talks and lectures worldwide.

Work

Penfield operated on in 30 years as a neurosurgeon about 750 epilepsy patients, initially often without success: " brain surgeon is a terrible profession."

Often he had in his operations, the open brain of patients going on. With weak electrical stimulation with a thin needle, he noticed that the patients do not feel any pain, but have complex sensory impressions, such as dreams or hallucinations. Spontaneous movements could be provoked in certain places. Language could be disturbed or affected. Complex visual sensations were produced. The patient imagined that something to see or hear. They remembered long forgotten.

1937 Herbert Jasper showed him a self-built electroencephalograph. Along with Jasper, he developed a method to locate reliable epileptic foci ( Montreal ) method.

Penfield set itself the goal to systematically examine the various regions of the brain to detect regularities in the mapping of regions to functions. For years he had initially unsuccessful. To abruptly changed by a tenth of a millimeter to the next, the effect of stimulation. Only at the central sulcus ( sulcus centralis ) he found it. On the one hand, could trigger muscle contractions that produce sensations of the same body parts on the other side.

His drawing of body projections in the size ratio of their projection fields, the homunculus was known.

After his retirement, he began to write novels, first No other Gods, a new version of the novel Story of Sari his late mother in 1935, where it was about a biblical theme. In 1960 he published his novel The Hippocrates Torch 1963 and his essay collection The second career. In 1967 The Difficult Art of Giving: Alan Gregg, the director of medicine at the Rockefeller Foundation, which had once financed his institute, and Man and his family over education in the family - he was president of the Vanier Institute of the Family of the Governor-General of Canada Georges Vanier and his wife Pauline Vanier. He also dedicated himself to philosophical questions, the seat of consciousness, or the difference between brain and machine and wrote a popular book.

Honors

During his lifetime he was called " the greatest living Canadian ". In 1952 he received the highest award of the British kingdom, The Order of Merit ( the order is only awarded to 24 living persons).

In 1960 he was awarded the Lister Medal and the first Royal Bank Centennial Award. 1966 Otfrid Foerster Medal he was awarded. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and several honorary doctorates (including McGill, Princeton, Oxford, Montreal). He was a knight of the French Legion of Honour, Companion of the Order of Canada (1967 ) and he received the Medal of Freedom. In 1950 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Trivia

Before him only Gustav Theodor Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig stimulation experiments were carried out on animals. Another scientist, José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado ( born 1915 ), who performed similar spectacular experiments, however, fell into oblivion.

Works

• Wilder Penfield, Theodore Rasmussen: The Cerebral Cortex of Man. A Clinical Study of Localization of Function. The Macmillan Comp. New York 1950; Hafner, New York 1968.
• Wilder Penfield, Herbert Jasper: Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain. Little, Brown, Boston, 1951.
• With Theodore C. Erickson: Epilepsy and Cerebral Localization: A Study of the Mechanism, Treatment and Prevention of Epileptic Seizures. Charles C Thomas, Baltimore, 1941.
• Lamar Roberts: Speech and brain mechanisms. Princeton University Press, 1959.
• The Mystery of the Mind: a critical study of consciousness and the human brain. Princeton University Press, 1975. ( Popular science book about brain research )
• No man alone. A surgeon 's life. Little, Brown and Company, 1977. ( Autobiography)
• The difficult art of giving. The epic of Alan Gregg. Little, Brown and Company, 1967.
• No other gods. Little, Brown and Company, 1954.
• The Torch. Little, Brown and Company, 1960.
• Second Career. With other essays and addresses. Little, Brown and Company, 1963.
• Man and his family. Toronto 1967.
• Publisher Cytology and pathology of the nervous System. 3 volumes. P.B. Hoeber, New York 1932.
• Kristian Kristiansen: Epileptic seizure patterns; a study of the localizing value of initial phenomena in focal cortical seizures. Thomas, Springfield, Illinois, 1951.