Brain Surgery

McGill University has always aspired to foster healthcare complexes second to none in North America. It was not surprising in the late 1920s that McGill should reach south to hire Wilder Penfield, a very promising young American brain surgeon, in the hope that he would make McGill and Montreal a leader in one of medicine’s most remarkable new subspecialties.

The plan worked spectacularly. In the early 1930s, Penfield was able to secure major support from the Rockefeller Foundation to establish the Montreal Neurological Institute, a stand-alone facility aimed at becoming a global centre of neurological research and neurosurgical excellence. The MNI opened in 1934, almost instantly fulfilled its promise (Rockefeller administrators considered it one of the best projects they ever funded) and continues to flourish today in our vastly more populated and fast-moving medical world.

Penfield, who became legendary in his lifetime, retired as director of the MNI in...