Wilder Graves Penfield

(1891–1976). American neurosurgeon, born in Spokane, Washington, and educated at Princeton and Oxford, where he held a Rhodes scholarship. At Oxford he came to know C. S. Sherrington, and returned to work with him for two years after qualifying in medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He also made contact with Gordon Holmes and other neurologists at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London, where David Ferrier had pioneered brain surgery. On his return to America, Penfield specialized in neurosurgery and worked in both New York and Baltimore before moving to Montreal, where he was largely responsible for setting up the Montreal Neurological Institute, erected with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and of which he became the first director. It has since led the world in the field of neurosurgery.

Penfield was remarkable not only for his high surgical accomplishment but also for his belief that neurosurgery made possible important advances in our scientific understanding of the functions of the brain. This, in its turn, made possible important progress in surgical treatment and rehabilitation. He made extensive use of advances in neurophysiology, in particular electroencephalography, and later of techniques in experimental neuropsychology, in ascertaining the localization and extent of brain lesions. He also undertook important work on the surgical treatment of focal epilepsy.

Penfield was a man of varied accomplishments, who wrote several novels in addition to an informative autobiography, No Man Alone: A Neurosurgeon's Life (1977). Of particular interest is his book with Theodore Rasmussen on The Cerebral Cortex of Man (1950).

(Published 1987)

— O. L. Zangwill

Bibliography
• Lewis, J. (1982). Something Hidden: A Biography of Wilder Penfield.

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