Wilder Penfield was born in Spokane Washington in January of 1891 and later became a Canadian citizen. He was educated at Princeton and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to England. While there he studied neuropathy with Sir Charles Scott Sherrington. He obtained a medical degree from John Hopkins and then trained for several more years at Oxford. He gained a position at the Neurological Institute of New York but when David Rockefeller wanted to endow an institute for the treatment of epilepsy and politics interfered in New York State, Penfield moved to Montreal and became the city’s first neurosurgeon. In 1934 he founded the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University where he also taught. He is known as the father of neuroscience.

He, with his colleague Herbert Jasper, established the Montreal procedure with which he treated patients with severe epilepsy. Before completing the surgery, he stimulated brain cells with electrical probes while the patients were conscious on the operating table to observe their responses. In this way he targeted the cells responsible for the seizures while avoiding side effects. Through this procedure, he established maps of the sensory and motor cortices of the brain and he demonstrated their connections to limbs and organs. In 1951 he published an important book called Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain. This had a major impact on our understanding of lateralization of brain function. In addition, Penfield pioneered the use of a technique that reduced the scarring in the brain which came to be known as the “Penfield dissector’ and it is used today. He is known for the 'Humunculous', research on memory and for being a proponent of bilingualism in childhood.


In 1960 he retired and became an author. In 1967 he was made a companion in the Order of Canada, in 1994 he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. He passed away of abdominal cancer in 1976.