Men of Dreams and Men of Action: Neurologists, Neurosurgeons, and the Performance of Professional Identity, 1920-1950

In the 1930s and 1940s, neurosurgeons and clinical neurologists engaged in a fierce exchange on the scope of their specialties. Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield's rhetoric of therapeutic superiority had a strong impact both on the Rockefeller Foundation's support for his institute and on the self-fashioning of neurologists. Neurologists articulated their identity in spirited performances at the meetings of specialist societies, their response shifting from a combative approach to a focus on internal organization. In light of the neurosurgeons' discourse, by the 1950s a new generation of neurologists created a revisionist narrative that inaccurately portrayed the clinical neurologists of the past as having been uninterested in therapeutics.