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The Mind Mappers, Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain
Eric Andrew-Gee
Random House Canada
2025, Toronto, Canada
ISBN: 978-1-03-900806-9
By Stephen Morrissey
Some books are read for entertainment. For example, detective novels. Some books are read because we want to learn something new about politics, lives of famous people, beekeeping, or how to play chess. However, the books I enjoy the most are those that we read and learn something about ourselves. Such books inspire us to go more deeply into ourselves, and help us to see things in a new way. This was my experience with Eric Andrew-Gee’s The Mind Mappers: Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain (2025). I immediately liked this book; I liked Andrew-Gee’s writing, I appreciated his thorough research, his occasional references to literature; and his knowledge of the English-speaking community in Montréal, our history, and our accomplishments. These include the founding of the Montreal Neurological Institute, locally known as The Neuro, and still pre-eminent among neurological hospitals.
Andrew-Gee’s book is about the co-founders of The Neuro: Dr. Wilder Penfield and Dr. William Cone. They began as friends and close collaborators in the 1920s, working together at New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital. In 1927, when Penfield was offered the job of chief brain surgeon at Montréal’s prestigious Royal Victoria Hospital, he set two conditions: The first was that the hospital would provide him with research as well as surgical facilities. The second was that Cone, his “undivorceable colleague,” as he called him, would come too. In 1934, with the help of a 1.2 million dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to McGill University, Penfield and Cone co-founded The Montreal Neurological Institute. This pioneering institution brought together the subdisciplines of neurology, neurosurgery, and neuropathology.
According to Andrew-Gee, Dr. Cone was a private person, not given to talking about himself. He was self-effacing, and he preferred to stay in the shadow of his oldest friend and colleague, Dr. Penfield, who was nick-named “The Chief” when he became director of The Neuro, where Cone was affectionately known as “The Boss.” Dr. Penfield remains a fairly flat, one dimensional character throughout most of Mind Mappers. Although he was the chief brain surgeon at Royal Victoria Hospital, Penfield handed off many surgeries to Cone while pursuing the funding that allowed him to steer The Neuro. His driving motive was ambition. Penfield does not gain complexity until the book’s “Epilogue: Through a Glass Darkly.” Here, we read of how Penfield grew away from neuroscience in his later years. After retirement, he wrote novels, his autobiography, and advocated for causes that were important for him.
With Penfield’s announcement in the late 1950s that he would retire from directing The Neuro, it was assumed that Dr. Cone would be promoted to that position. According to Andrew-Gee, this should have been the pinnacle of Dr. Cone’s career: a confirmation of Penfield’s belief in him and his confidence in Cone’s ability to lead. Yet he was passed over by Penfield. Cone wasn’t even on the short list of candidates. I emphasize this to show how deeply betrayed Cone must have felt by the way Penfield treated him. Mind Mappers convincingly argues that it was not only betrayal that Cone felt, it was also humiliation at being passed over for a position that most of his colleagues felt he was next in line for and rightfully deserved. Dr. Cone committed suicide in his office at The Neuro on 4 May 1959.
In personality and temperament Dr. Cone and Dr. Penfield were very different people. Andrew-Gee researches and depicts Cone’s unhappy childhood: a time of illness for him compounded by the deaths of his father and grandfather. Later, Cone had a profoundly unhappy and childless marriage, in part because he devoted so much of his time to Penfield and their patients. Now, there was this stunning betrayal by his oldest friend and colleague. Dr. Cone must have wondered if his friendship with Penfield had ever really existed, or had he deceived himself all of these years. By contrast, Penfield’s mother doted on him and he was much loved by her and by his wife, their children, and grandchildren. Penfield was an extrovert whose ambition after founding The Neuro shifted to winning a Nobel Prize for his discoveries in neuroscience. He never did win one. Cone comes across as psychologically complex, while Penfield seems lacking in complexity. Andrew-Gee’s book prompted my realization that Penfield’s image of respectability was flawless except for one major flaw–his betrayal of his best friend.
After visiting The Neuro in April 2026, I remembered that I had, at home, a copy of Wilder Penfield’s Man and his Family. In fact, I’d had it ever since it was first published in 1967. A few days later, I read Penfield’s book. Its theme is the importance of family in society. Penfield argues that for children, the foundation of family life is essential to a healthy adult life. The book is worth reading for its ideas, but it is not well written. Man and his Family also raises questions about how Penfield might have judged Cone for the lack of father figures in his own childhood. After retiring from The Neuro, Penfield served as President of the Vanier Institute of the Family. He was one of the last people to meet with former Governor General Georges Vanier on the day before Vanier died.
My first time visiting The Neuro was in October 1969 to visit my stepfather, who had brain tumor surgery there in the late 1950s; he seemed to have recovered and married my mother several years after this surgery. He needed surgery again in 1966, for a second tumor removal. Dr. Theodore Rasmussen was then The Neuro’s director; he was also my stepfather’s surgeon, and successor to Dr. Penfield. This second surgery was unsuccessful. For the next three years, my stepfather lived alternately at home for a few weeks, then in residences (one in Rawdon, Québec). His physical and mental decline continued, and he returned to The Neuro a final time in fall 1969. I don’t know how my mother survived those years, my stepfather did not survive. I should add that today, the post-operative mortality rate for brain tumor surgery is about 35%. It was much lower sixty years ago.
I remember my visit to The Neuro in late October 1969. My stepfather was in a bed directly across from the door of his hospital room, one shared with perhaps three or four other patients. I was nineteen years old and had just started university. I remember trying consciously to think of something reassuring and kind to say to my stepfather. I said something before leaving. And as someone who remembers so much, who has made memory the basis of much of my writing, I just can’t remember what I said to him. I do remember the morning, a few days later, that my mother received a phone call from The Neuro, telling her that he had died; I was lying in bed upstairs and I could hear the phone ring and my mother answer and speak to whoever was calling. I knew intuitively what the call was about. It was more relief that we felt than anything else; it was the end of my stepfather’s suffering. But relief is short-lived and grief has a long afterlife.
Now, here is an interesting coincidence regarding my stepfather. Dr. Penfield’s book, Man and His Family, was made up of his Josiah Wood Lectures on the family, lectures given at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. My copy of this book was “presented to us under the terms of the Josiah Wood lectureship.” The coincidence is that Josiah Wood was my stepfather’s grandfather. Josiah Wood’s daughter, Dora Beatrice Wood, married Mark Edgar Nichols, who was a founder of the Canadian Press and editor of newspapers in Montréal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. They had three sons, Mark, Charles, and my stepfather Graham Nichols.
I admire Dr. Penfield and Dr. Cone. Their personal and professional story, one that is not commonly known, as it is described by Eric Andrew-Gee, only increases my admiration and appreciation for these two men and their advances in neuroscience. Their most enduring legacy, other than important innovative surgical techniques and the significant mapping of the areas of the brain, is the founding of the Montreal Neurological Institute. The Neuro is an important place for neurological research and patient care, it is a place full of dedicated doctors and nurses. But there is also a human dimension to specialized medicine. Mr. Andrew-Gee’s book explores this aspect of The Neuro through the relationship of its co-founders; he does so with superb research and poignant insights. Andrew-Gee writes: “Both Cone and Penfield felt their lives were failures in different ways, and it is true that in some areas they fell short. The bitterest failure of all was the most meaningful: Cone and Penfield mapped the brain but lost each other.”
Andrew-Gee identifies the enduring success of their long collaboration: “As the medical historian Yan Prkachin has argued, the ‘interdisciplinary environment created within the walls of the Montreal Neurological Institute constitutes the key site for the foundation of modern neuroscience.'”
And Andrew-Gee concludes by writing, “Cone and Penfield may not have perfected neurosurgery or discovered the seat of the soul. But to anyone who has tried since—or tried to fathom the many other mysteries of the universe in our heads—they were not failures at all.”
Eric Andrew-Gee’s The Mind Mappers: Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain takes us deeply into the relationship of Dr. Wilder Penfield and Dr. William Cone and the founding of the Montreal Neurological Institute; it was an historical period that includes tragedy, betrayal, love, selfless commitment, and the fragility of human relationships.
