A walk on a fall day, 7 October 2013

 

Full text of "Continuing Continuation, on Louis Dudek"

 

Peel Street, downtown Montreal,1970s

First published in Urban Grafitti, Edmonton, AB, 27 March 2013.

by

Stephen Morrissey

 

“...remember/ the paltriness of worldly claims,/ and the immensity/ that is always now.”

—Louis Dudek, Continuation III  

 

 

1

 A curious literary synchronicity: on January 4, 1963, Margaret Avison experienced a mystical experience in which she discovered her faith in God; this had a profound influence on her future poetry. On January 4, 1967, exactly four years later, Louis Dudek began writing the first of three volumes of one of the most important modern poems in Canadian literature, Continuation.   In Notebooks 1960 – 1994 (1994), Dudek writes, “The great poems tend to be great expository statement. And each such poem is a central poem for the poet in question, containing the core of his vision and thought.” That’s what is in Continuation, Dudek’s “vision and thought.”   Several years before Dudek published Continuation I, Susan Stromberg-Stein referred to it as “a poem that will possibly be his [Dudek’s] final ongoing poem, for he has subtitled it ‘An Infinite Poem in Progress.’ In this work one observes the poet combining lyrical fragments and setting them into a continuous form that has the permanence of finished poetry...” (Stromberg-Stein, M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1977)   Dudek was not interested in writing an autobiography, he had an abhorrence of sensationalism, and he rejected what he considered any egotistical drawing attention to oneself. However, Ron Everson, an old friend of Dudek’s, states in a 1983 interview that Dudek’s theme in his poetry “is his whole life.” Dudek writes, “The whole story means my whole life... But you know we say poetry, or any art, is the expression of the life of the artist, of his whole psyche, of himself on the page . . . Each poet, in fact, out of the scattered thoughts going on in his mind, makes the construct that he calls the finished poem.” (Louise Schrier interview, 1990)   How a poet handles writing about “his whole life” depends on the poet’s intention; is the poet’s voice an authentic expression of his psyche or is it ego-centric and self-promoting? As well, Dudek does not condemn strong emotion in poetry or even highly emotional confessional poetry; what he condemns is self-inflation.   Dudek’s dismissal of John Cage, and other avant-garde artists, who might have embraced and supported what he was doing in poetry, is unfortunate. Dudek writes, “John Cage: A soft-brained idiot. The purpose of his inane talk is a subtle kind of self-promotion, disguised as humility, but full of name-dropping and self-pampering.” (Notebooks, 1994)   One of Dudek’s great underlying concerns in Continuation is the passion of a life lived for poetry, a life dedicated to poetry. He describes writing poetry as an “addiction.”   Dudek lived in New York City for a number of years in the late 1940s and early 1950s and it was during this time that he came under the influence of Ezra Pound; while there he knew other poets, including Paul Blackburn. I remember Dudek telling me of knowing Blackburn, that as they walked along a city street together Blackburn climbed a telephone pole and sat on the top of it.   Dudek’s years in New York City, studying at Columbia University, meeting Ezra Pound and other artists—being in a milieu of art and creativity—are the seminal years in Dudek’s creative life.   Dudek contributed to the image of himself as conservative in his criticism of hippies, experiments in alternative lifestyles, and student rebellion in the mid-to-late 1960s; however, his earlier long poems and Continuation, a poem that is more sophisticated and avant-garde than most poetry being written in Canada today, refute this perception.   Robin Blaser writes, “They understand him to be a reactionary, which is to say that they misunderstand him.” (Infinite Worlds, 1988)   Most people who have studied Dudek’s poetry feel that he was overly influenced by Ezra Pound; however, eventually this changed and as much as Dudek had once supported Pound he later found fault with him. This is an example of the puer overthrowing the senex, it is when the children or followers of people who are significant to them finally divest themselves of the other person’s influence; the alternative is to never fully realize one’s own potential. I suspect that it is only with Dudek’s growing discontent with the importance he had given to Pound that he was able to begin writing Continuation. As an aside, I remember Dudek telling me that in all of his years of teaching he never convinced anyone of the greatness of Pound’s poetry. (See, as well, Dk/ Some Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. Louis Dudek, 1974)

  

 

2

 If having a large number of books by a specific poet, and books on that poet’s work, is an indication of a literary influence, then three significant influences on my writing have been Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, and Louis Dudek. They are poets I read and reread, poets whose work means much to me at both a personal and creative level.    In Continuation, epigrams are juxtaposed before and after other dissimilar epigrams, it is similar to the way people think, jumping from one idea to another apparently unrelated idea; in this, the poem is an “internal monologue”, that’s what Dudek called it.   Dudek’s Continuation is a post-modern poem attacking post-modernism and extolling the modernist movement.   Continuation is similar to a painting by Jackson Pollock, there is no narrative or focal point to observe, every part of a painting by Pollock is equal to every other part of the same painting. Similarly, every part of Continuation is equal, although different, to every other part, there is no narrative leading up to a climax in the poem.   There are two ways Dudek could have written (or “assembled”) Continuation, both presume that he already had the epigrams, short statements, and other fragments of writing that make up the poem. The first is by taking these fragments and putting them together in a random way. The second method would be to take all of the fragments and consciously piece them together giving the poem the appearance of a random organization.   Among the poets who influenced Dudek is Stéphane Mallarmé whose poem, Un coup de dés, is important to the writing of Continuation.   Three “epigrams” from John Cage: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.” “The goal is not to have a goal.” “As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.”   Dudek was always concerned about irrationality and the artist; he seemed to posit a connection between irrationality and the very people that he felt threatened the old, established order.   I think of Margaret Laurence’s novel, A Jest of God, with the blue faced barbarians waiting to invade the walled villa where children are playing with no idea of their possible destruction. What threatens to disintegrate society and destroy propriety—“barbarians” as Dudek described them—is always present.   Always present in Dudek’s work is the belief in the transcendent power of poetry. Poetry and art were accorded an almost religious quality by Dudek; his desire was to reinvent poetry and, like Ezra Pound, to “make it new”.    Dudek was always aware of the small readership for poetry and how inconsequential poetry is for the great majority of the population. (As many people die on the roads on a holiday weekend as read poetry Dudek once said.)   It’s a mystery how poems come to be written. It could be that writing poetry mostly comes in short bursts of inspiration (to inspire, to breathe in spirit); Continuation, a long poem, has the intensity of many short poems, or epigrams, put together.   Dudek is fairly relentless in his criticism of both Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, two highly distinguished Canadian scholars and critics. McLuhan, like Dudek, was very much involved with Ezra Pound in the late 1940s and early ‘50s.   Marshall McLuhan’s “probes”, his epigrams, are insightful and cause the reader to understand, in a new way, the digital and electric media that is so much a part of the world in which we live.   Three epigrams from Marshall McLuhan: “Discovery comes from dialogue that starts with the sharing of ignorance.” “Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.” “The story of modern America begins with the discovery of the white man by the Indians.”   McLuhan, who was conservative and a religious person, was one of the first academics to explain the new technological environment in which we live.   McLuhan writes: “I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitude.”   Dudek and McLuhan were writing and thinking from two different perspectives. Dudek’s is the world of poetry; he writes from a perception of the eternal and the infinite. McLuhan’s is the world of temporality, he is writing of a contemporary and changing world of electric media.   I never agreed with Dudek’s negative assessment of Northrop Frye; indeed, I wonder if there wasn’t some bitterness regarding Frye on Dudek’s part, especially after reading Frye’s mean-spirited 1955 review of Dudek’s Europe (1954); Frye writes: “... I find large stretches of the book unrewarding. In the first place, the influence of Pound is oppressive. Pound is everywhere: the rub-a-dub three- and four-accent, the trick of snapped-up quotations and allusion, the harangues against usura, the toboggan-slide theory of the decline of Europe after the Middle Ages, and so on. In the second place, the conversational style brings the ideas into sharp relief, and the ideas are commonplace, prejudice reinforced by superficial tourism...”   In a 1965 article in The Tamarack Review, Dudek writes, “I consider both McLuhan and Northrop Frye as really poets manqués, best appreciated when we read their speculations as imaginative constructs made out of their real materials, not as ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ theories at all.”   A coincidence of dates: Valerie Eliot, T.S. Eliot’s widow, has just died, reported in the newspaper for 16 November 2012. The obituary states that T.S. Eliot died on January 4, 1965, two years to the day after Margaret Avison’s religious experience and two years before Dudek began writing Continuation I.   Louis’ cousin and close friend, the artist Stanley Roznyski, passed away on December 9, 2012. Born on February 21, 1931, he grew up near where Louis lived in the east end of Montreal. Roznyski has a moving eulogy for Louis in Eternal Conversations, Remembering Louis Dudek (2003).   Dudek writes: “…you can’t write good poetry because you’ve read many books or because you think great thoughts. Poetry is a mysterious process that happens to very few individuals, and they are not fortunate in it. (Emily Dickinson and Thomas Trehearne, completely unknown in their time; Blake and Holderlin, cursed with mental ills and isolation.)” (Poetry Canada Review, early 1990s) This reminds me of the lack of recognition Dudek felt his own poetry had received and his sense of isolation as a poet and a person. Robin Blaser describes Dudek as a “walking loneliness”. (Infinite Worlds, 1988)  

 

 

3

Three quotations from The Other Voice, Essays on Modern Poetry (1990), by Mexican poet Octavio Paz: “What is an ‘extensive poem’? The dictionary says that to extend is to increase something so that it occupies more space. To extend also means to expand, to develop, to enlarge, to unfold, to occupy greater terrain. In its original and primary sense, extension is a spatial concept. Hence an extensive poem is a long poem. Since in language words come one after the other in a row, an extensive poem is one that has many lines and the reading of which takes a considerable amount of time. Space is time.” “A great change: the first-person singular becomes the main character of the extensive poem.”  “The best example of the new poetics was Un coup de dés, a strange poem that has as its subject the act of writing a poem. But a poem never before attempted: an absolute poem. Not a poem on the poem but the poem on the poem.” In light of Paz’s definition, Dudek’s Continuation is an “extensive” poem.   Dudek suggests that his epigrams are a way for him to write poetry, they are the first line of a poem that proceeds to other epigrams and disparate lines and then a whole poem; or, he juxtaposes epigram after epigram in a kind of free floating mix of confused random associations that eventually, in a synergistic way, take on more meaning than if the epigrams were presented individually; this is how Continuation is similar to some of Cage’s writing in which dissimilar statements are juxtaposed together.   “Meaning” in Continuation is achieved by the repetition of epigrams (and other fragments of writing) with similar ideas; otherwise, on first reading, the poem seems “meaningless”.   In other words, as one might expect, this is not “traditional” poetry.   The “problem” with 1940s/1950s Abstract Expressionism—the art of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Marc Rothko and others—is that despite its relative popularity, more people wanted art to be a representation of “reality” than total abstraction. Abstract Expressionism was superseded by Pop Art—the art of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and others—an art extolling in an ironic way the very popular culture, or low art, that the previous generation of Abstract Expressionist artists condemned. This was suggested in John Logan’s play on Marc Rothko, Red.   Pierre Trudeau’s epigrammatic statement, “Reason over Passion”, was later used in an ironic way, it was sewn onto a quilt by the artist Joyce Weiland and is on exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.   Dudek began Continuation when he was 49 years old, a month later he turned fifty; the concept for how to write the poem was discovered by Dudek in 1956, when he was only thirty-eight years old; however, Dudek tells us that he could only write Continuation after he discovered his authentic voice, one that was a memory of his thought processes when he was a child. With this in mind, Continuation is Dudek’s life-long work, his life opus.   Dudek’s Continuation is one of the most radical poems in Canadian literature, “radical” meaning to go to the roots of poetry and language.    A common idea among Jungians is that “the brighter the light the greater the darkness.” Dudek’s emphasis on rationality hides the irrational dark side of the poet.   Dudek’s conservative persona is a mask worn by a poet whose life was lived quietly and conservatively but whose mind and imagination were open to a multiplicity of thoughts and creative ideas.   Rationality is a veneer of conscious order over the depth and many layered complexity of the unconscious. See C.G. Jung’s Red Book (2009) for a description of the journey into the unconscious mind.   All art is vision, or else it is the repetition of the past.   Continuation is, in some ways, one of Dudek’s “travel” books, but this is not travel to a place as was Europe (1954) or En México (1958); this is a journey across time, it is the journey of a poet’s life during middle age to old age and preparation for death; the last poems in Continuation III, including his final reflections on life, must have been written only months before Dudek’s passing.   In these final poems, Dudek returns repeatedly to the concept of time as infinity, he envisions an ultimate “shining” that illuminates the darkness of ignorance with a kind of mystical perception of life.

__________________________

 

This essay is dedicated to two friends—Richard Sommer and Keitha K. MacIntosh—both of whom I met in the early 1970s and both of whom passed away in 2012. I am grateful for having known them, and for their kindness and generosity to me.

 

Note: This essay continues the work begun in my essay Reading Louis Dudek’s Continuation: An introduction to a major Canadian poem.

 

 

Stephen Morrissey

    November 2012 – April 2013 • Montreal

 

 

 

 

Tenant Eviction, 01 August 2015

 

The Mind Mappers, Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain, by Eric Andrew-Gee

             

          

This review was published in Public Reverie on 5 July 2026.

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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

Review by Stephen Morrissey

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, the lives of famous people, beekeeping, how to play chess, or something else; the really important books, in my experience, are those that we read and learn something about ourselves, that inspire us to go more deeply into ourselves, that help us to see things in a new way, and these are the books that I enjoy the most. This was my experience with Eric Andrew-Gee's The Mind Mappers, Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain (2025). Right from page one I liked this book; I liked Andrew-Gee's writing, I appreciated his thorough research, I liked his occasional references to literature; and I liked his knowledge of the English-speaking community in Montreal, our history, and our accomplishments. These include the founding of the Montreal Neurological Institute, familiarly 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 had been close friends,  beginning in the 1920s at the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City and then, in 1929, at The Montreal Neurological Institute. Dr. Cone was a private person, not given to talking about himself or promoting himself; he was self-effacing, and he preferred to stay in the shadow of his oldest friend and colleague Dr. Wilder Penfield, who was nick-named "The Chief" when he was director of The Neuro, where Cone was affectionately known as "The Boss". Dr. Penfield remains a fairly flat, one dimensional, character until the book's "Epilogue: Through a Glass Darkly", in which 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 planned to retire from the directorship of The Neuro it was assumed that Dr. Cone would be promoted to that position, it should have been the pinnacle of Dr. Cone's career, a confirmation of Penfield's belief in him and confidence in Cone's ability, but he was passed over by Penfield. Cone wasn't even on the short list of possible candidates. I emphasize this to show how deeply betrayed Cone must have felt by the way he was treated by Penfield; but it was not only betrayal 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. On one hand, we have Cone with his unhappy childhood, a time of illness for him including the deaths of his father and grandfather, and later his profoundly unhappy marriage, and now there was 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? On the other hand, we have Penfield who was doted over by his mother and much loved by her and by his wife, children, and grandchildren; he was an extrovert whose later ambition was to win a Nobel Prize for his discoveries in neuroscience. Cone was psychologically complex while Penfield lacked this complexity. Penfield's image of respectability was flawless except for one major flaw, it is his betrayal of his best friend.

After visiting The Neuro in April of this year I remembered that I had, at home, ever since it was first published in 1967, a copy of Wilder Penfield's Man and his Family; a few days later I read Penfield's book, its theme is the importance of family in society, 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. After retirement from The Neuro Penfield served as president of the Vanier Institute of the Family, he was one of the last people to meet with Governor General Georges Vanier the day before Vanier died.

My first time visiting The Neuro was in October 1969 to visit my stepfather who had brain tumour surgery there in the late 1950s; he seemed to have recovered and it was several years after this surgery that he married my mother. Surgery was needed again in 1966 for a second tumour removal; The Neuro's director, my stepfather's surgeon, and successor to Dr. Penfield, was Dr. Theodore Rasmussen. This second surgery was not a success and for the next three years my stepfather lived alternately at home for a few weeks, then in residences (one in Rawdon, Quebec), and his physical and mental decline continued until his return to The Neuro in the fall of 1969. I don't know how my mother survived those years, my stepfather did not survive. I should add that today the postoperative mortality rate for brain tumour surgery is about 35%, and it was much lower sixty years ago in 1966.

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 that was 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, but 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 Montreal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver, and they had three sons, Mark, Charles, and my stepfather Graham Nichols.

I admire Drs. Penfield and 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 of dedicated doctors and nurses. But there is a human dimension and Mr. Andrew-Gee's book explores this aspect of The Neuro in the relationship of its co-founders, he does so with superb research. 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.

He continues,

           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." 

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." (p. 290)

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.

About the author: Stephen Morrissey is the author of twelve books, including poetry and literary criticism. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Honours in English with Distinction, from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in 1973. In 1976, he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from McGill University. In the 1970s, Morrissey was associated with the Véhicule Poets. The Stephen Morrissey Fonds, 1963 - 2014, are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library at McGill University. Stephen Morrissey married Vancouver poet Carolyn Zonailo in 1995. Visit the poet at www.stephenmorrissey.ca

 

Mural by Mary Harris Filer, at the Montreal Neurological Institute, 1

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. 

Mary Harris Filer

                                                 

Artist's signature at bottom of the mural

Plaque beside the mural

Dr. Wilder Penfield and Dr. William Cone

                                    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.

Dr. William Cone


Cone's obituary

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

                                     

                                             Wilder Penfield's name inscribed on the wall at the 

                                                            entrance to The Neuro with the names of other 

                                                            important neurologists; Cone's name is absent

                                                                                                                                        

Dr. Penfield’s Josiah Wood lectures 

                                         

                                                       

Note: The statue at The Neuro's entrance is "a marble sculpture titled La Nature se dévoilant devant la Science ("Nature unveiling herself before science"). Installed in 1934, it is a copy of the original sculpture from 1899 by Ernest Barrias, chosen by founder Dr. Wilder Penfield to symbolize the ideal of neurological research."

Walking on Mount Royal, 30 April 2011

This was the day Cassidy and I walked on Mount Royal and spread Jack's ashes, he was a wonderful and intelligent Whippet, we all loved that dog and remember him with fondness.