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Today's Google Doodle celebrates the 127th birthday of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who developed a groundbreaking epilepsy treatment called the Montreal Procedure.
In the 1930s, while working as a neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, Penfield had a patient who reported smelling burned toast just before her seizures. He realized that he could use that hallucinatory scent to pinpoint the part of the brain that was seizing - and put a stop to it.
With the patient wide awake, but under local anesthetic, he used electrodes to stimulate parts of her exposed brain, asking her what she felt, saw, heard, or smelled each time. When she declared, "I smell burned toast!" Penfield determined that he must have found the center of her epilepsy. It worked; he removed a small piece of brain tissue from the spot, and the woman never had a seizure again. Penfield and his colleagues published a paper on the method in 1951, and since then it has helped bring relief to many epilepsy patients.
Of course, there are many different kinds of epilepsy, and the Montreal Procedure doesn't work on all of them, but it made a significant difference for a large number of people. And Penfield performed the procedure more times than any other neurosurgeon working at the time. In the process, he assembled a detailed map of where sensory and motor functions happen in the brain, and which areas of the brain receive input from, or send output to, which parts of the body. He also discovered that using an electrode to stimulate the temporal lobes, in particular, can produce very vivid sensory memories - such as the smell of burned toast.
Penfield died in 1976, after a lifetime spent doing what he described as "the best way to make the world a better place."
Liputan6.com, Jakarta - Google merayakan hari lahir Wilder Penfield yang ke-127 tahun dengan menampilkan Google Doodle di laman mesin pencariannya, Jumat (26/1/2018).
Wilder Penfield dikenal sebagai seorang ahli bedah dan peneliti otak yang memiliki prestasi luar biasa hingga membuat dirinya dijuluki sebagai "Orang Kanada paling hebat".
Wilder Penfield dikenal sebagai sosok brilian yang mengembangkan sebuah perawatan bernama Montreal Procedure (Prosedur Montreal) bersama dengan rekannya, Herbert Jasper pada 1950.
Adapun Montreal Procedure adalah perawatan bagi pasien yang memiliki kondisi kejang otak, dengan cara menghancurkan sel saraf bermasah dengan menariknya menggunakan alat beraliran listrik dengan kondisi pasien masih tersadar.
Meski dianggap sebagai orang Kanada, Wilder Penfield sebenarnya lahir di Spokane, Washington, Amerika Serikat. Ia tumbuh besar di Hudson, Wisconsin, sebelum akhirnya mengenyam pendidikan di Princeton dan mendapatkan beasiswa kuliah di Merton College, Oxford, pada 1915 untuk belajar neuropatologi.
Ia juga meraih Rhodes Scholarship dan menghabiskan bertahun-tahun belajar di Oxford, Spanyol, Jerman, dan New York, sebelum menjadi ahli bedah saraf pertama di Montreal.
Impian besar Wilder Penfield adalah ingin mendirikan institut neurologis, di mana ahli bedah, peneliti laboratorium, ahli physiologi, dan semua ilmuwan di bidang neurologi dapat bekerja dan berbagi pengetahuan mereka.
Meski dianggap sebagai "orang Kanada paling hebat", Penfield sebenarnya lahir di Spokane, Washington, Amerika Serikat. Ia tumbuh besar di Hudson, Wisconsin, sebelum akhirnya mengenyam pendidikan di Princeton dan mendapatkan beasiswa kuliah di Merton College, Oxford, pada 1915 untuk belajar neuropatologi.
Usai menyelesaikan gelar kedokterannya, ia kemudian menjadi ahli bedah saraf Montreal dan mendirikan Institut Neurologis Montreal pada 1934. Di tahun inilah ia resmi menjadi warga negara Kanada.
Pensiun pada 1960, ahli bedah saraf terampil ini mengabdikan tahun-tahun terakhir hidupnya untuk memberikan dukungan terhadap pendidikan di universitas dan kepentingan publik lainnya.
Namun karena kanker perut yang dideritanya, Penfield pun mengembuskan nafas terakhirnya pada 5 April 1976 di Rumah Sakit Royal Victoria, Montreal pada usia 85 tahun.
Guna mengenang jasanya di bidang kesehatan dan merayakan ulang tahunnya yang ke-127, Google pun menghadirkan sosok luar biasa ini ke dalam bentuk Google Doodle di hari ini.
Even in 2018, Wilder Penfield’s approach to treating epilepsy seems like something out of a science fiction movie. Penfield — the celebrated Canadian-American neurosurgeon whose 127th birthday is celebrated today in a Google Doodle — pioneered the technique of removing a portion of the skull while a patient was still awake.
Penfield developed the method, called the “Montreal Procedure,” in the 1930s. It helped him pinpoint the source of the seizure in the brain so he could remove it, and relieve patients of debilitating attacks.
But his work in epilepsy also increased our understanding of the architecture of the brain, mapping how its folds and areas relate to sensations in the body.
Penfield’s surgeries helped epilepsy patients
Descriptions of Penfield’s Montreal Procedure are an odd thing to behold. Patients stay calm and awake while the surgeon literally electrocutes their brain.
Keeping the patients awake was crucial to the success of the procedure. Often in epilepsy, seizures originate from one scarred or damaged region of brain tissue. The brain surgeon’s goal is to identify that tissue while protecting healthy parts.
With the skull open and the brain exposed, Penfield would probe the brain’s surface with a small electrode. If he touched an area of the brain that related to feeling in the fingers, patients would report numbness in their fingers. Prodding different areas of the brain with small electrical impulses could get patients to suddenly retrieve memories, see flashes of light, or smell an odor. The electrode would essentially turn on, or off, the brain circuitry involved in those sensations and perceptions.
People with epilepsy often get “auras” — an odd, specific sensation (a smell, or taste, or thought) before a seizure. If Penfield found the area of the brain that produced the aura, he could remove it, which then greatly reduced the risk of seizures in patients.
Penfield could do this while patients were awake because, ironically, the brain itself has no pain receptors. And local anesthesia allowed him to remove part of the skull without causing much pain.
In treating epilepsy, Penfield sketched a new map of the brain
The Montreal Procedure helped many deal with the debilitating effects of epilepsy, but it also opened up a whole new avenue of understanding how the brain works. Since the electrical impulses would temporarily turn on, or off, a function of the brain, by slowly, meticulously, prodding the brains of his patients, Penfield was able to develop a map of brain function.
Here’s a photograph from a 1937 Penfield report — it’d not for the extremely faint of heart.
Each number in the image corresponds to a particular brain function and sensation Penfield mapped. No. 18 corresponds to “Slight twitching of arm and hand like a shock, and felt as if he wanted to move them,” according to the report. At No. 8, the patient “felt sensation of movement in the thumb,” but it didn’t actually move. At No. 13, the patient felt “numbness all down the right leg.”
This was the first time areas relating to speech were mapped, McGill University, which employed him, explains on its website.
In some instances when Penfield prodded a person’s brain, they would suddenly experience a detailed personal memory. This was among the first evidence to suggest that there are physical structures for memory in the brain. One of Penfield’s patients, when prodded with an electrode, responded, “I hear voices. It is late at night, around the carnival somewhere — some sort of traveling circus. I just saw lots of big wagons that they use to haul animals in.”
Penfield and his colleagues used this brain map to develop a homunculus, a cartoon drawing of a human body, sized proportionally to the amount of brain space devoted to each body part.
As the homunculus shows, we use a lot of our brainpower for dexterity (see the huge hands), speech (see the giant lips and tongue), smell, and sight. And we don’t have a whole lot of mental hardware devoted to our chests.
Penfield’s explorations of the brain helped scientists target the malfunctions that led to speech disorders and problems with memory. And the Montreal Neurological Institute, which Penfield co-founded at McGill, became a premier surgical treatment center for epilepsy.
He’s also made an impression on popular culture. Science fiction author Philip K Dick named a device to control emotions of people the “Penfield mood organ.”
Penfield was borne in Spokane, Washington, but did most of his groundbreaking work at McGill in Canada, where he’s celebrated as a national hero. In 1934, he gained Canadian citizenship, and he later became known as “the greatest living Canadian.” He was immortalized in a 60-second Canadian television spot that depicted one of his patients, mid-surgery, declaring, “I smell burnt toast!” during the procedure. Hence the toast in today’s Google Doodle.
