Canadian Journal of Health History

Wilder Penfield, the famous Canadian neurosurgeon who founded the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) in 1934, carried on an abundant correspondence with his mother, Jean Jefferson Penfield, from his childhood until her death in 1935. This two-way conversation-in-writing, which can be consulted at the Osler Library at McGill University,¹ is part of the vast archival legacy left by the physician. Relative to other sources, the letters have been understudied by historians. This correspondence provides ample information about middle-class Anglo-American families in general and, in particular, the life of an Anglo-American woman who raised three children without a husband. It chronicles early twentieth-century undergraduate education at an Ivy League institution, gives insight into the professional activities of doctors and [End Page 396] scientists in the 1920s and 1930s, illustrates family life, and tracks popular perceptions of domestic policies and world events.

As Penfield's biographer Jefferson Lewis documents, Jean Jefferson Penfield came from a family of settlers who farmed in upstate New York. Her father made a large profit selling cattle during the Civil War and moved to Wisconsin, where he became a shareholder and eventually the president of the First National Bank of Hudson. Jean was educated at Milwaukee Ladies Seminary, a school for women of her newly acquired social class. After the sudden death of her fiancé, she met her future husband, Charles Samuel Penfield. The Penfields were New England settlers who arrived from England in the seventeenth century and moved westward in the ensuing period. In the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Samuel was born in Ohio. He followed his own father into medicine, graduating from Hahnemann Homeopathic Medical College in Chicago in 1880. The couple married that same year and settled in Spokane, Washing-ton. They had three children, of whom Wilder was the youngest, and in 1899, when Wilder was eight, Jean left her husband and moved back to her parents' town in Wisconsin, where she ran a school for a while. Wilder would only see his father once more, at age 13. His father did not attend his graduation from Princeton University, and died shortly thereafter. Wilder got his MD from Johns Hopkins University in 1918, took up neurosurgery, and accepted a position in Montreal in 1928.²

Penfield is best known for his work at the MNI, which he founded and where he served as director from 1934 to 1960. From the very beginning, he envisioned the MNI as both a hospital and an institute, where basic scientists and physicians from a wide range of fields would work closely together to advance studies of the brain as well as to care for patients. In this distinctive culture of integrated research, Penfield took the lead in awake brain surgery, sometimes called the Montreal Procedure, which allowed researchers to map the brain during surgical procedures because patients could communicate their sensations to the surgeons. This procedure was featured on a popular Canadian Heritage Minute shown on Canadian television in 1991, which has forever instilled in some of us a fear that the smell of burnt toast signals an oncoming seizure.³ The 60-second video also informed a wide audience of the importance of his work, which included researching the parts of the brain that control memory, speech, dexterity, smell, and sight. Penfield's maps of the cortex – the sensory and motor homunculi – have been unforgettable features [End Page 397] of introductory psychology and neuroscience textbooks and have become a part of popular culture.⁴

In two linked papers in this special issue of the Canadian Journal of Health History on the theme of Mothering, Medicine, and Health, we explore a myriad of themes revealed in the letters between Jean Jefferson Penfield and Wilder Penfield, collectively making a case for the importance in the history of medicine of mothers of doctors and of the mother–child relationship for physicians. As we read, re-read, and discussed the extensive correspondence between mother and son, it became evident to us that these letters demonstrate the unfolding of a very close relationship in the first three and one-half decades of the twentieth century. As we explain in our papers, Jean Jefferson Penfield edited and typed her son's letters and collected them in a bound volume. Her original letters are also available in the archives. In our papers we engage different methods to show how their intimacy manifested in the pages of their letters. Working independently, we offer two readings of this fascinating correspondence, highlighting as well the wide potential of this source for multiple and interdisciplinary scholarship.