Who Is Wilder Penfield? 6 Quotes From The Neurosurgeon

Friday’s Google Doodle honors the brain surgeon who made significant strides in treating and understanding the brain, especially the brains of people with epilepsy. The Doodle is in honor of Dr. Wilder Penfield’s 127th birthday and all the important work he did before his death at the age of 85.

Wilder, educated at Princeton and then Oxford, was a trained surgeon who pioneered techniques and he established the Montreal Neurological Institute. At the institute he established, surgeons, researchers and scientists were able to work together to share their knowledge and come up with innovative medicine.

Penfield and the other specialists at the institute came up with the “Montreal procedure” or the method of treating epilepsy in patients by destroying the cells in the brain that caused seizures, according to the Institute. This procedure led to the discovery that when a specific part of the brain is stimulated it can bring back a specific memory. The Doodle involves an animation of burnt toast because it is one of those recall memories, said Google.

Six quotes from Dr. Penfield:

“The brain is the organ of destiny. It holds within its humming mechanism secrets that will determine the future of the human race. ”

On his book, The Torch, “It’s the right way, really, the novelist approach. When you write imaginatively, you know what’s right. The historian can’t do that when he says such and such happened.”

“If you set out to do your best and work hard, the paths will open up for you. I know. It’s worked for me,” he said in an interview with an intern at Royal Victoria Hospital in 1976, Alan Blum.

“In spite of all these disquieting triumphs in the field of natural science, it's astonishing how little man has learned about himself, and how much there is to learn.”

“There is goodness and compassion in every man. Sometimes it is well hidden, I admit, but in my experience it is always there,” he said in a panel in 1960.

“Brain surgery is a terrible profession. If I did not feel it will become different in my lifetime, I should hate it,” he said in 1921.