CMAJ - A bedside conversation with Wilder Penfield

(Alan Blum, MD, University of Alabama School of Medicine, Tuscaloosa, Ala.): "From July 1, 1975 to June 30, 1976, I served as an intern in internal medicine at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montréal, Quebec after graduating from Emory University School of Medicine. At that time, interns were still given their own on-call room.

My pre-morning rounds ritual consisted of a maple donut and orange juice at the hospital coffee shop, while also devouring The Star, The Gazette and La Presse. Olympic fever was in the air. Separatist tensions were still palpable and René Lévesque, the charismatic, chain-smoking leader of the separatist Parti Québécois dominated the news. I was fascinated by the renowned Montréal Neurological Institute, where I once went to watch neurosurgery through opera glasses from an enclosed observation area above the operating room.

Recently, I came across six prescription-size pages of handwritten notes from an hour-long conversation I had with the Institute’s founder, Dr. Wilder Penfield on the morning of Apr. 3, 1976, when he was a patient in the Ross Pavillion at the Royal Vic. Having hoped to meet him since the start of my training, I stopped off at my room after completing night-call and sign-out to muster the courage to introduce myself and to pick up my copy of The Torch, his novel about Hippocrates’ battle to lay the foundations of medicine…"