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  • The Wounded Brain Healed: The Golden Age of the Montreal Neurological Institute, 1934–1984 by William Feindel and Richard Leblanc
  • Edward Shorter
The Wounded Brain Healed: The Golden Age of the Montreal Neurological Institute, 1934–1984 William Feindel and Richard Leblanc Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016, xiv + 632 p., $100

Despite the fact that Richard Leblanc's name appears as co-author, this is very much the book of William Feindel, the third director of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) from 1972 to 1984. Feindel, a neurosurgeon, is said to have worked at this labour of love for many years. And it shows, in the wealth of detail about the MNI, its personnel, buildings, and programs that comes pouring forth, from the time of its founding in 1934 to the end of Feindel's tenure as director. This is the story of "The Neuro," as it was known locally in Montreal but always respectfully referred to in the volume as the "MNI."

Every loving detail, every smidgen of information – with a few exceptions (explained below) – that one could conceivably wish to know about the MNI is encompassed within these 632 glossy and beautifully illustrated pages. It is an affectionate testimonial to one of Canada's great medical institutions and will enthrall those with personal memories of the Montreal scene in those years as they pick out familiar faces from the photos or recognize research in which they participated. But this is the problem: the book is a chronicle and not really a history.

For Feindel, who passed away in 2014, his own participation in events is quite the story. An entire chapter is called "William Feindel's Departure," meaning his leaving the MNI in 1954 to become inaugural chair of neurosurgery at the University of Saskatoon. Wilder Penfield, the first director, pleaded with Feindel to stay and said: "My initial reaction is that if the University of Pennsylvania – California, Chicago, Ann Arbor, N.Y. were to offer you a chair, or even Toronto, you would have to consider it" (273). But Saskatoon! And, of course, Feindel's own period as director is charted in great detail, not inappropriately.

The hero of the story is Wilder Penfield, who had been on staff at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Lured by a note from Edward Archibald, chair of the Department of Surgery at McGill, to come up to Montreal for a look around, and excited by the challenge of carving a brilliant new research centre in neurology and neurosurgery out of nothing in Montreal (as opposed to further political struggles in New York), Penfield decided to accept the post. Penfield, of [End Page 254] course, went on to become one of the most reputed neurosurgeons of his day, noted for excising the foci of epilepsy. He brought the MNI, which opened in 1934, into the international scientific mainstream. Given that this is one of Canada's main medical narratives, it is a story worth telling.

But Feindel, it must be said, wades through it as though he were writing a diary, taking each three-year span in the history of the institute and – in this book of 36 chapters, an epilogue, four further "theme" chapters, and three appendices – noting for each period the arrivals and departures, changes in the buildings, main program initiatives, and listing all publications. This invariant repetition becomes wearisome, and one loses sight of an overarching narrative. The three main parts correspond to the tenure of the three directors: Penfield, Theodore Rasmussen, and Feindel himself.

Few facts are so trivial as to warrant exclusion. The chapter on "Life at the Institute" during the Second World War (Chapter 12), for example, gives ample scope to the local reactions to the death of US neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, including that of Polish colleague Jerzy Chorobski, a previous MNI member, who wrote from Warsaw in 1945: "I hope I will be able some day to come over to America and see what interesting things you have done in the field of neurosurgery during these six black years" (177). Mildly interesting as a quote, but multiply it by 10,000, and you have the makings of a plodding...

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