The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital) is located at the top of University Street in downtown Montreal, across the street from the old Royal Victoria Hospital. The "Royal Vic" is now a part of the "super hospital" on the Glen in West-end Montreal, and the site of the old Royal Vic building is being repurposed and is under construction. (As seen here on 30 April 2026.)
Here are some details of Mary Harris Filer's mural at The Neuro.
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| The co-founder of The Neuro, Wilder Penfield, in brown suit and arm extended; note the extensive coverings worn by surgeons to avoid infections in patients |
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The patient is modelled after the artist, Mary Harris Filer |
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| In the operating room |
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| Visual depiction of mental illness as a kind of demonic possession this might refer to epilepsy (a major concern of Drs. Penfield and Cone); epilepsy was considered a mental, moral, or spiritual illness until the Twentieth Century |
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Dr. William Vernon Cone (1897–1959) was a pioneering American-Canadian neurosurgeon who co-founded the Montreal Neurological Institute (The Neuro) with Wilder Penfield in 1934 |
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| Politicians who helped provide funding for The Neuro, in centre is Maurice Duplessis, premier of Quebec, and to the right is Mayor Camilien Houde of Montreal; they are shown above the image of the Royal Victoria Hospital |
Some of the poems in Lines on Trout River have now been published in Public Reverie; thank you, Theresa Smalec! A chapbook containing the complete series of poems can be ordered from https://turrethousepress.ca/ Here is the first poem in the chapbook.
This is not yet the sea, it is the river.
—Louis Dudek, Europe
It’s nice being alone
in old age, sitting
on the side of the bed
with the radio on,
classical music
on the CBC, and
a book I’m reading,
The Epic of Gilgamesh,
reading
by the light
of a lamp
bought at
an auction
thirty years ago,
and the lamp
even then was old,
made in the 1930s;
it was the MSO
playing Mahler’s
4th movement
of Symphony # 5,
and outside the insects
sing what my English
ancestors called “the
Canadian Symphony”
after they moved
to Ontario from Blackburn
in the north of England,
the least fashionable part of the UK,
they were builders, plasterers,
painters, carpenters,
workers in the mills,
carters, and landlords
renting flats they constructed,
a distant cousin collecting rents,
and one was a publican
and farmer, at the Yew Tree
Inn—oh tree of death—and the sounds
are Canadian sounds
on a fall night,
in the darkness,
before sleep.
Lines on Trout River has just been published by Jame Hawes at Turret House Press; this chapbook (booklet) is made up of thirteen poems that refer to the Trout River and the archetype of rivers, time, old age, and the relentless changes in life that we all experience. I lived beside the Trout River from 1979 to 1997 and it was the river that I liked most about living in southwestern Quebec. I think this is the best work I've written in many years; it's different than previous poems I've written but I think it's my authentic voice at this time of my life.
Copies can be purchased from www.turrethousepress.ca
In Lines on Trout River, Stephen Morrissey draws together influences as diverse as The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Mahler, Nelligan, and Wordsworth, yet the poem remains unmistakably rooted in the particular history and geography of rural Quebec. The landscape becomes a “thin place,” where the visible and invisible worlds meet, and where poetry itself becomes an act of spiritual witness. Meditative, unsentimental, and deeply humane, The Lines on Trout River is both elegy and testimony: a powerful reflection on the passage of time and the persistence of the soul through memory and art.
the Lines separating
youth from old age,
and writing poems;
fields bordered
by drainage ditches
and the Morrison Side Road
I know of two murals at McGill University, one is by Marian Dale Scott, a prominent artist and wife of poet and law professor Frank Scott, and the other is in a conference room on the first floor of the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital (The "Neuro") on University Street, part of the McGill University Health Care hospitals. "The Advance of Neurology" is by Mary Harris Filer and was unveiled by Quebec premier, Maurice Duplessis, on 14 November 1954.
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| Mary Harris Filer |
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| Artist's signature at bottom of the mural |
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| Plaque beside the mural |
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| Looking south on de Maisonneuve driving west, just after Decarie |
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| A jewelry store on Victoria Avenue below Sherbrooke |
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| Corner Somerville and Victoria Avenue |
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| At a reading at the Visual Arts Centre on Victoria |
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| 2014 |
My people are destroyed
for lack of knowledge…
Hosea 4:6
We forget the land we stand on
and live from. We set ourselves
free in an economy founded
on nothing, on greed verified
by fantasy, on which we entirely
depend. We depend on fire
that consumes the world without
lighting it. To this dark blaze
driving the inert metal
of our most high desire
we offer our land as fuel,
thus offering ourselves at last
to be burned. This is our riddle
to which the answer is a life
that none of us has lived.
—Wendell Berry
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| James Tate |
Please do not steal my flowers;
they are my last love,
I am immune to everything
but flowers. The pageantry
of most encounters
is not quite as exciting
as the pollinating
pasqueflower, it's like a river
washing itself over
and over.
And when the pretty waitress
Lillian of French descent
walks over a grate in the sidewalk
and a gush of hot air
slams her dress over her ears
I do not enjoy the view
as much as that of phlox blooming.
I regard human beings as signals
and therefore bow my head
to hide my silly grin
at the raucous world--a monkey
hanging by its tail
from an intensely white cliff:
that's why we hold out
our hands all day, all life,
to catch something like that.
And nightletters, the urgent hundred
syllables by which we
express less than the minimal
Aristotelian tragedy--
an ash to swallow every morning
with my cereal,
a dictionary of stones in the evergreen.
In the distance the man
who is in charge of beating children
hangs his hands on my cart
and I sprinkle pollen of goldenrod
on his open wounds:
these are ordinary obligations,
but flowers, flowers--
there are so many colors;
more than there were
in poor Joseph's coat I think.
Note: "Peddler" is from The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970) by James Tate.
Dr. Wilder Penfield and Dr. William Cone, residents
in background; photograph by Yousuf Karsh, 1952; private collection
The co-founders of The Neuro are Dr. Wilder Penfield and Dr. William Cone. Of course, we've all heard of Wilder Penfield, he's famous! There is a street named after him in Montreal and years ago we received in the mail a short book by Penfield on the subject of the family; it was Man and his Family (1967), based on Penfield's Josiah Wood Lectures; Josiah Wood was my step-father's grandfather. I have only recently heard of Dr. William Cone, this was in a newspaper article (by Allison Hanes; published in the Montreal Gazette on 28 February 2026). If you were to visit The Neuro today, you would probably not see any evidence for the existence of Dr. William Cone, except his image in the mural by Mary Harris Filer, and yet Cone was the co-founder of The Neuro. About Filer’s mural, Allison Hanes writes,
The work shows Penfield and Cone back to back at the bedside of a young woman, surrounded by a group of nurses, colleagues, contemporaries and some of the greats from the history of neurology. While Penfield, arms extended, looks toward the horizon, Cone’s sorrowful gaze is fixed on the patient — a perfect synopsis of their medical styles.
I plan to read The Mind Mappers: Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain, by Eric Andrew-Gee (Random House Canada, 2025); published only last year, this sounds like an excellent book and will explain and describe something of the relationship of Wilder Penfield and William Cone; Cone deserves our attention, he dedicated his life to neurology and is also an eminent and distinguished physician. The William Cone Fonds are archived at the Osler Library at McGill University.
I can understand how Dr. William Cone felt betrayed by Penfield when he was passed over as head of The Neuro when Penfield retired; that is, Cone co-founded The Neuro and he was passed over by Penfield, the other co-founder of The Neuro and Cone's long-time friend. It was perhaps a correct decision but Cone’s feeling of betrayal were overwhelming; this betrayal, it is suggested, led to Cone`s suicide in his office at The Neuro.
Perhaps the images of mental illness, the suffering endured by people as depicted in Filer`s mural, describe Cone's mental and emotional state at that time in his life. Dr. Cone’s suffering has more to do with psychology than with neurology; in Jungian terms, Cone was confronted by his shadow, by the unresolved dark side, the repressed side, of his psyche; he couldn’t deal with the personal injustice of betrayal by a longtime friend and colleague. At first I thought that Wilder Penfield didn't think Cone was up to the job of running an institution that Cone co-founded, but now I wonder if it was a case of misjudgment by Penfield; or, Penfield was not aware of his own shadow and Dr. Cone suffered the consequences. Whatever the reason, it led to Dr. Cone's death.
Dr.Penfield was succeeded at The Neuro by Dr. Theodore Rasmussen. One day I will explain something of our family’s experience at The Neuro.
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Dr. William Cone Cone's obituary |
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This portrait of Wilder Penfield, painted by Lynn Buckham in 1972, is on permanent exhibit on the first floor of The Neuro; behind Penfield is the statue at the The Neuro's entrance |
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| Dr. Penfield’s Josiah Wood lectures |
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