Largesse to McGill

McGill University at Montreal last week received another grant ($1,232,652) from the Rockefeller Foundation. The new funds will pay for a neurological institute under direction of Professor Wilder Graves Penfield, will attract more able men to Dean Charles Ferdinand Martin's notable company of medical authorities. The medical faculty already includes:

Professor James Bertram Collip, 39, biochemist, co-developer of insulin, more recently isolator of emmenin, one of the sex hormones beneficial in treating female disorders.

Professor Boris Peter Babkin, 55, physiologist, onetime assistant of famed Russian Ivan Pavlov (conditioned reflexes), and himself an investigator of gastric secretions.

Professor Israel Mordecai Rabinowitch, 41, director of the department of metabolism of Montreal General Hospital, who, especially interested in diets for diabetics, guides research on the parathyroid gland, gall bladder, kidney, liver.

Assistant Professor Maude Elizabeth Seymour Abbott, 63, with her historical essays and large collection of human hearts.

Professor William Vernon Cone, 35, neuro surgeon, who went to McGill from Manhattan's Presbyterian Hospital in the wake of Dr. Penfield.

They and their facilities make McGill, oldest of Canada's nine medical schools, incontestably the greatest.* This is as the late Sir William Osier wished. He taught there ten years before he went to the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins and Oxford, ordered his books and ashes returned there. McGill keeps them, under the guardianship of his cousin's son, Dr. William Willoughby Francis, in a quiet oak-paneled memorial room.

Professor Wilder Graves Penfield, 41, the star currently in the ascendant at McGill, trained at Princeton, Oxford (Rhodes scholar), Johns Hopkins. He studied under choleric Brain Surgeon Walter Edward Dandy of Johns Hopkins, interned under choleric Brain Surgeon Harvey Williams Gushing of Harvard, rounded out his training in London (with Surgeon Sir Percy Sargent, Neurologists Gordon Morgan Holmes and Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson). A final polishing at Manhattan's Presbyterian Hospital, which Philanthropist Edward Stephen Harkness helped to endow with Neurological Institute, and teaching practice at Columbia University--then Dr. Penfield was ripe.

Like his preceptor Professor Gushing, Professor Penfield makes a fetish of proficiency in diverse activities. Professor Gushing collects everything which can be assembled, sorted and classified. (Harvard's Warren Anatomical Museum has his series of War helmets, a piece of barbed wire he fetched from a barricade.) Professor Penfield once coached the Princeton football team, is an ardent tennis player, farms extensive acreage near Lake Memphremagog, Quebec, likes good literature, good music. Best of all he enjoys a case of epilepsy.

With no real joy do Canada's eight other medical faculties behold McGill's good fortune. The University of Toronto, nearest rival, consoles itself with the fact that to its professors was given Canada's first & only Nobel Prize, the 1923 one in Medicine, for the discovery of Insulin, diabetes specific.

The prize went jointly to Dr. Frederick Grant Banting, who declares that he was the "originator of the idea," and to Professor John James Rickard Macleod, his supervisor, both of whom split their prize money with two other men--Physiologist Charles Herbert Best, Biochemist Collip-- who had helped in the investigations.

*Manitoba (Winnipeg), Dalhousie (Halifax), Toronto (Toronto), Queens (Kingston, Ont.), Western Ontario (London, Ont.), McGill (Montreal), Montreal (Montreal). Laval (Quebec), Alberta (Edmonton).

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