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Globe and Mail
06-06-2025
- Health
- Globe and Mail
New book humanizes Canada's most famous neurosurgeons, Wilder Penfield and William Cone
'There are more connections between the hundred billion neurons in a human brain than there are particles of matter in the known universe.' This description of the brain's complexity appears late in Eric Andrew-Gee's story of neurosurgeons Wilder Penfield and William Cone. Along with a reference to Emily Dickinson, who said the brain is 'wider than the Sky,' the words serve to remind at once how little and how much we know about the organ and, thus, ourselves. But much of what we do know is thanks to the pioneering achievements of the famous Penfield and the forgotten Cone – the men who worked together for decades in what they called a 'double harness.' In The Mind Mappers: Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain, Andrew-Gee, who is the Quebec correspondent for The Globe and Mail, recounts the story of Penfield's work on the brain, taking us well beyond what readers of a certain age will recall from the 'I can smell burnt toast' Heritage Minute, a reference to which opens the book. Andrew-Gee writes the history of not just Penfield, but also of the people who made his discoveries possible through his surgeries on patients with epilepsy, especially those conducted at Montreal's famous Neurological Institute, known as the Neuro. At the centre of Penfield's work was his best friend, Cone, also a groundbreaking and 'natural' neurosurgeon, but one who shunned credit and spotlight and was overshadowed by his partner. Beyond 'burnt toast': Eric Andrew-Gee probes the story of Penfield and Cone in The Mind Mappers Cone's story is equal parts extraordinary and tragic. As a scientist and surgeon, he was instrumental to the creation of the Neuro, to the mapping of the brain, to Penfield's success and to the care and well-being of his many patients. He invented surgical tools. He revolutionized methods of making surgical processes sterile. He helped lead a neurosurgery hospital in England during the Second World War. He also died by suicide in 1959 after struggling with mental health issues and, quite likely, his own sexuality (and possibly romantic and unrequited feelings toward Penfield). He died during a time, as Andrew-Gee notes, when approaches to both mental health and homosexuality were barbarous. This book is remarkable because it tells several stories in parallel, including histories in miniature of brain science, Canada, Quebec, Montreal and McGill University throughout the early-to-mid 20th century. Each of these intersects and enlivens the rest without any seeming superfluous, but Mind Mappers is first and foremost two stories. One is the mapping of the brain during an exciting and often gruesome era of discovery. The other is the relationship between Penfield and Cone, which is heavy with pathos in its biographical details and the author's own capacity for insight and compassion. For all the book's intricate and interesting folds, the story of Penfield and Cone is the most compelling of the lot. As Andrew-Gee concludes, 'Cone and Penfield mapped the brain but lost each other.' The theme of their story is asymmetry. Penfield became rich, famous and known to history. Cone did not. Penfield ran the Neuro and was known as 'the Chief.' When it came time to retire and find a replacement, he passed over Cone, who was known around the institute as 'the Boss,' but who was never seriously considered for the top job despite his tireless, at times compulsive, work ethic. Even the private practice the two ran was unevenly split, with Penfield doing fewer surgeries but making the lion's share of the money. Andrew-Gee nonetheless declares in the afterword that Penfield 'can stand easy about the body of work he left behind.' It's an important conclusion drawn from a nuanced reading of history that the author, to his credit, recognizes by way of acknowledging the scope of his own work and focus. 'The crux of my story,' he writes, 'was the worst chapter of Penfield's life – his betrayal of Cone and Cone's subsequent suicide.' Andrew-Gee calls this 'the period that saw Penfield at his least admirable, his most exploitative and self-centered.' The time Andrew-Gee focuses on is of historical importance because it's a relatively short period of several decades, from the 1920s to the late 1950s, during which neuroscience and neurosurgery were professionalized and grew by leaps and bounds. To put it plainly: One would have been desperate, if not utterly foolish, to risk brain surgery in earlier years. By the time Cone died, one's odds of a good outcome had shot way up. The shift in chances of surviving a surgery without serious and permanent damage, and of being cured, grew throughout the intervening years, in large part thanks to Penfield and Cone. And yet Penfield is remembered and Cone is not. Thus Mind Mappers is not just a book, but also the project of rebalancing history and recalling Cone to a contemporary audience. 'In trying to elevate Cone from obscurity,' Andrew-Gee writes, 'I also came to see how much of Penfield's reputation rests on the hidden work of others.' Thanks to this book, that work and those stories, especially Cone's, are no longer so hidden.
Globe and Mail
31-05-2025
- General
- Globe and Mail
Beyond ‘burnt toast': Eric Andrew-Gee probes the story of Penfield and Cone in The Mind Mappers
'I can smell burnt toast.' Most Canadians over 30 remember the 1991 Heritage Minute short that celebrated the revolutionary Dr. Wilder Penfield, who experimented on the brain's temporal lobes in the 1930s. Less well remembered is his partnership with the Iowa-born neurosurgeon William Cone. It was this collaboration that enabled Penfield to turn the Montreal Neurological Institute, familiarly known as the Neuro, into a global epicentre for brain research between the late 1920s and late 1950s. In his new book, The Mind Mappers, The Globe and Mail's Eric Andrew-Gee brings the unusually symbiotic relationship between this odd couple compellingly to life, giving due respect to Cone, whose life ended tragically inside the institution to which he had devoted the best part of his career. The partnership of these two neurosurgeons in Montreal seems like one of those perfect alignments of serendipity. How does it come about? Cone and Penfield had these eerily parallel childhoods. They were both raised in the American Midwest in the turn of the 20th century. Penfield's father had abandoned the family after going bankrupt as a feckless doctor in Spokane, Washington. He packed his family up on a train, sent them to live with his wife's family and then never joined them. Cone's father contracted typhoid fever and died when Cone was 2. They both grow up with stories of medical greatness in their families, but also medical failure. When they finally cross paths at Presbyterian Hospital in New York in the 1920s, their heads are in a very similar place. Penfield is one of a couple dozen practising neurosurgeons in the world, and he's basically learning on the fly because there's no one to teach him. That's the state of neurosurgery at the time. It was so rudimentary, so crude, so dangerous for patients, and so heartbreaking for practitioners who were constantly losing patients. Cone arrives as a research fellow. He's interested in the brain from his medical training in Iowa. His grandmother had died of a brain tumour, so he had the brain on the brain. Penfield wonderfully describes this moment when he sees Cone walking down this stairwell in the hospital. In retrospect, he realizes this is the moment that set the course of his life. They immediately realize there's chemistry there, although they're polar opposites. The differences are striking. There seems to have been a kind of symbiosis through opposition. Penfield's this tall, dapper, handsome, athletic guy. Very outgoing, charismatic and well-spoken. Cone is none of those things. He's stocky and socially awkward. He might be diagnosed with Asperger's nowadays. He prefers tinkering in his workshop, inventing new surgical tools, and sitting with patients, holding their hands. Penfield is an excellent doctor and cares about patients, but he also has grand philosophical visions of what the study of the brain could be. It's a perfect match because one is very hands-on and practical and one is a silver-tongued orator and scientific visionary. When Penfield is recruited by the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, his one condition is they hire Cone too. You started off researching Penfield, and then stumbled upon this little-known character, Cone, who effectively ends up the hero of your book. Tell me about that discovery. There's an internal history of the Neuro – a coffee-table sort of book – with a chapter on Cone that describes this figure who's probably the greatest neurosurgeon of his generation. The master of masters. Incredible judgment, incredible dedication and the most patient-oriented doctor anyone had ever met. Thanks to his extraordinary gifts as a doctor, he made possible the scientific leaps that had originally gotten me interested in Penfield's work. Then, in his early 60s, he dies suddenly in his office in tragic circumstances that bring the golden age of the institute to an end. I got the sense that this was a great archetypal story, this master-and-apprentice relationship. As a storyteller I was hooked, but as a person I was just so moved by Cone's saintliness, by the fact that this medical hero who was at the heart of one of the great stories in Canadian science was totally forgotten. He really comes to life in the book, which is remarkable given the lack of paper trail. Penfield had a sense of his legacy, so he kept every piece of paper that crossed his desk, and a journal. Cone has virtually none of that. He hated to write because it slowed him down. He wouldn't even write patents for the surgical tools he invented. It could have made him tons of money. People would badger him to write back about a simple, 'Are you coming to this medical conference?' Author John Green became obsessed with tuberculosis – so he wrote a book about it So virtually everything we know about Cone comes from Penfield's archive, from their correspondence, because he did write to Penfield. Their correspondence is extraordinary. Tender longing when they're apart. It was in the clipped style of mid-century Protestant North American men, but it's nonetheless revealing. To that point, there's a strong suggestion that Cone's devotion to Penfield – he turns down the opportunity to run his own institute to stay on as Penfield's second-in-command, for substantially less pay – might have been more than platonic. Male friendships can be as fraught and turbulent as any love affair. I do think Cone's feelings ultimately tipped over into the romantic. I don't know if he ever acknowledged that to himself. Almost certainly not to Penfield. It was illegal to be homosexual in Canada at that time. There's all this circumstantial evidence that his love for Penfield was something more than platonic. He had this bitterly unhappy marriage, had no children. On its own, that doesn't tell you much, but then there's the tone of the letters to Penfield. When Penfield doesn't appoint Cone his successor when he decides to retire, it devastates him. Probably it wasn't the right role for Cone in some way, but the way Penfield went about it felt to Cone like a stab in the back. He has a meltdown. He falls into a deep depression in the years after this rift. And I'm not sure the scale of his reaction makes sense if his feelings for Penfield were merely platonic. What are Cone and Penfield's greatest achievements – either singly or together? Cone made the hospital hygienic, functional, medically sound, so that people wanted to come there and be cured. But it was Penfield's ideas that made their legacy. Penfield had a sister who had a brain tumour in her frontal lobe that caused seizures. In 1928 he and Cone operated on her at the Royal Victoria Hospital and she almost died. Penfield was a little too aggressive and carved out about an eighth of her brain without really knowing what the frontal lobes did. Book Review: Original Sin details Biden's declining health and a cover-up by closest advisers She survived the operation, but the tumour grew back and she died. In the meantime, her personality changed. She became, as he described it, like a lump of putty. Penfield realized he'd been reckless, and that he needed to map the brain if he was going to be an effective surgeon. That's what he and Cone did, and that's their greatest achievement. They were like the early cartographers. They developed this procedure for treating epilepsy that would simultaneously map the brain. In the course of doing this, they were also figuring out what different regions of the brain were responsible for. And this is absolutely crucial, not only for surgeons to know where not to cut, but for the treatment of neurological conditions. It was the mind-body problem that had always puzzled philosophers and scientists: Is there a ghost in the machine, different from our gray matter, that makes us? This interview has been condensed and edited
Arab News
09-02-2025
- Health
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Mystery of the Mind'
Author: Wilder Penfield Can the mind be explained by what we know about the brain? Is a person's being determined by their body alone or by their mind and body as separate elements? With a foreword by Charles W. Hendel, an introduction by William Feindel, and reflections by Sir Charles Symonds, 'The Mystery of the Mind' is Penfield's compelling personal account of his experiences as a neurosurgeon and scientist observing the inner workings of the brain in conscious patients.
