No Man Alone: A Surgeons Life

The book is somehow the final countdown regarding the many sided activities of one of the most prolific writers from the branch of the neurosurgery, as one part of the title suggests. But it is more than a neurosurgeon's life, even if it tells us a lot about its scientific foundations. It is also the story about the countless people involved more or less in the long, rich and surprisingly diverse life of the author, as the first part of the title indicates. In a certain way, the main idea of the book is related to one single aspect of Wilder Penfield's enterprises: the foundation of the Montreal Neurological Institute (known also as MNI). All the roads of professional and personal life of Penfield bring us into the very day of the opening of the institute, after decades of wandering across the American and European continent. We have just one extra final part, called "Epilogue", where the modesty of the author can be guessed. Even if Penfield was the vision and the executive of the MNI project, he is considering that the story of the institute, after its foundation, must be written by "someone else". So was to be: death came soon after the moment of ending the Preface. In this way, the book is a book of farewell, not only the very many people named or not named in the book, starting from members of his family, scientists including Nobel Prize laureates, members of the medical staff including technicians, nurses and orderlies, but also from wild forests, lakes and rivers. We have to notice also the ocean, where Penfield was close to a premature end during the First World War. From another point of view, the book is an ocean in itself. But not all its contours are visible from the beginning. One has to look after, sometimes with a microscope, sometimes with a telescope. So I did myself. In this sense the book is just an introduction in many directions of study, including the study of the human dimensions of an exemplary career. Eugen Goaga MD PhD

You don't have to learn a little bit about neuroscience to understand why Wilder Penfield, M.D., was so important. You don't have to appreciate the contrast between the ridiculous 19th-century field of phrenology and the eloquent experimental data summarized in Penfield and Jasper's landmark _Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain_ to understand what the name Penfield means in neuroscience today.In fact, even a casual reading of Rudy Rucker reveals jacked-in cybernauts, their neurosurgeons doubtless Penfield's spiritual descendants.The work stands on its own, and this autobiography will barely touch on it, or the turbulent relationship between Penfield and Jasper (the latter is barely mentioned.) But if your question is, "Who was that man," this book provides the answer.If you're not interested in an out-of-print book, there's a book called "Something Hidden," by Penfield's grandson, that covers much the same ground; in fact, whole chapters are practically lifted word-for-word with only the person changed from first to third.