The physiologist and the neurosurgeon: the enduring influence of Charles Sherrington on the career of Wilder Penfield

Wilder Penfield, a Rhodes scholar from Princeton University, New Jersey, was a student in the first course on mammalian physiology given in 1915 at Oxford University by Charles Sherrington, newly arrived from Liverpool where, as Holt Professor of Physiology for 20 years, he had become a leading authority on the physiology of the nervous system. The practical 'exercises' as well as graduate research on the Golgi apparatus and the decerebrate preparation, carried out by Penfield in Sherrington's laboratory, gave him the groundwork to develop his career as a physiological surgeon, who made fundamental observations on functional localization in the human brain during the surgical treatment of patients afflicted with epilepsy.