Medicine

Wilder Penfield's 127th birthday

January 26, 2018 19:59·
Dr Wilder Penfield

Dr Wilder Penfield

Hence the Doodle which shows a brain, eyes and understanding the look and smell of burnt toast to a region in the brain.

Today's Google doodle celebrates the 127th birthday of Wilder Penfield, the man behind that unusual cultural reference and, more importantly, a groundbreaking neurosurgeon who pioneered new treatments for epilepsy.

Later celebrated as a pioneering researcher and a humane clinical practitioner, Penfield pursued medicine at Princeton University, believing it to be "the best way to make the world a better place in which to live".

Born in Spokane, Washington, Penfield became a Canadian citizen in 1934 when he founded the Montreal Neurological Institute and became its first director.

His patient alerted him when she smelled her seizure trigger, meaning the problematic neurons were being tickled, and he was able to cut out that specific part of the brain. Chief among them was the development of the "Montreal procedure", a method of treating epileptic seizures by literally destroying nerve cells in the brain, with the patient kept awake during the procedure.

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While under local anesthesia, he removed part of the patient's skull to expose her brain. He speculated that if he could remove tissue at that location, it could reduce her seizures.

Penfield focused a lot of his work on helping patients with uncontrollable seizures, who had few options for treatment in the early 1900s.

He was known for prompting memory recall during surgery via temporal lobe stimulation, treatment of epilepsy by surgery, the Montreal procedure and the Penfield dissector, amongst other things. He also used this technique to create detailed maps of the brain's sensory and motor cortices, and with his colleague Herbert Jasper, published the landmark neurosurgery text, Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain, in 1951.

Canada has honoured the legacy of Dr. Penfield, who died in 1976, in numerous ways.

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