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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."
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.
Friday’s Google Doodle celebrates the birthday of Wilder Penfield, a scientist and physician whose groundbreaking contributions to neuroscience earned him the designation “the greatest living Canadian.” Penfield would have turned 127 today.
Later celebrated as a pioneering researcher and a humane clinical practitioner, Penfield pursued medicine at Princeton University, believing it to be “the best way to make the world a better place in which to live.” He was drawn to the field of brain surgery, studying neuropathy as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University.
In 1928, Penfield was recruited by McGill University in Montreal, where he also practiced at Royal Victoria Hospital as the city’s first neurosurgeon. Penfield founded the Montreal Neurological Institute with support from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1934, the same year he became a Canadian citizen.
Penfield pioneered a treatment for epilepsy that allowed patients to remain fully conscious while a surgeon used electric probes to pinpoint areas of the brain responsible for setting off seizures. The experimental method became known as the Montreal Procedure, and was widely adopted. But Wilder Penfield’s research led him to another discovery: that physical areas of the brain were associated with different duties, such as speech or movement, and stimulating them could generate specific reactions — including, famously, conjuring a memory of the smell of burnt toast. Friday’s animated Google Doodle features an illustrated brain and burning toast.
Penfield’s groundbreaking research revolutionized the study of neuroscience, allowing scientists to map areas of the brain, including the cortical homunculus, connected to critical motor functions, as well as to better understand the process behind sensory experiences like memory and hallucinations.
Dr Wilder Penfield on March 28, 1967. Boris Spremo—Toronto Star/Getty Images Scientist and physician
In his later life, Penfield became an author and education advocate, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950. A decade later, he was awarded the prestigious Lister Medal by the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and in 1994, he was inducted into Canada’s Medical Hall of Fame. Penfield died of abdominal cancer in 1976, but his contributions to our understanding of the brain are commemorated in street names and academic institutions, as well as in science fiction. In Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, characters use the “Penfield Mood Organ” to call up emotions on-demand.
Penfield, W., Erickson, T.C., Thomas, C.C. (1941). Epilepsy and Cerebral Localization: A Study of the Mechanism, Treatment and Prevention of Epileptic Seizures.
