This Day In Football History

We wanted to share an obscure bit of trivia. Today's Google Doodle celebrates what would have been the 127th birthday of Wilder Penfield. While you may not have known of him, he was a 20th century neurosurgeon who contributed to much of what we know understand about brain function.

Penfield was born in the US but lived most of his adult life in Canada. His list of academic achievements are too long to list, but include Membership in the Royal Society (who also counts among its members Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Charles Darwin, and a dude named Stephen Hawking).

Oh....and here is a picture of him when he played football at Princeton. A sub freshman on the 1911 National championship team (which, according to Google, only allowed 15 points that season), he also was named head coach in 1914 and lead the Tigers to a 5-2-1 record. In the middle of the season, Penfield was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for the following year, and he was accepted for admission to Merton College, which granted him special permission to defer his entrance until the end of the autumn of 1914 so that he might fulfill his coaching responsibilities at Princeton.

After completion of medical school and embarking upon his career as a medical professional, Penfield came to realize that he could not carry out an effective approach to knowledge of the human brain and make use of that knowledge all by himself. He began to dream of organizing an institute where neurologists, neurosurgeons, and neuro-pathologists would work together with the kind of team work he had learned as football player and coach. This led him to Montreal, Canada, where he joined the medical faculty of McGill University while also working as a surgeon at two different hospitals. If that weren't enough, he would go on to found the Montreal Institute of Neurology which became a respected center for neurological research and treatment worldwide. In his later years, Penfield penned at autobiography entitled No Man Alone, a phrase repeated frequently in the book to underline his emphasis on the team approach to neurological research and treatment.

It's pretty cool to think that maybe the most important neurosurgeon of 20th century played and coached Div 1 football. Not only that, but that the impact the game had on him played a key role in his approach throughout the rest of his life and many achievements.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Penfield!

(For further reading on Wilder Penfield, we found most of our information above in a great article here, as well as a Wikipedia entry here.)