ABSTRACT
Wilder Graves Penfield is best known for pioneering work on the surgical relief of epilepsy, which required the electrical stimulation of the brain in conscious patients – a procedure also enabling him to delineate the motor and somatosensory cortices, map language areas and explore facets of the human mind. Penfield's driving mission was to establish an institute where doctors, neurosurgeons and pathologists could work together in their pursuit of understanding and treating epilepsy. Penfield localised the function of speech by getting his patients to read aloud and establishing whether any arrest of vocalisation resulted from brain stimulation. During the 1930s and 1940s, the main targets of Penfield's excisions were the frontal and parietal cortex – but over time he turned his interest to seizures originating in the temporal lobes. However, one of the problems facing surgeons is not so much identifying the tissue but removing it in such a way that it does not cause any other secondary deficits.
