Tilney Memorial

Some 40 years ago, a young cub reporter on the New York Sun decided to become a doctor. To earn his tuition at Long Island College of Medicine, he wrote baseball stories for a boys' magazine. So popular were his tales that the editor offered him $5,000 a year to leave medical school. Fortunately for Science. Fred Tilney wanted to be a professor. He graduated with honors, studied neurology in Germany, went back to teach in Columbia. Later, he wrote 111 books and articles on the evolution of the brain, encephalitis, a score of other subjects, reorganized single-handed the famed Neurological Institute of New York. When he died two years ago, at the age of 62, Dr. Frederick Tilney was known as the greatest U. S. specialist on brain function.

Last week in Manhattan a group of prominent doctors, scientists, lawyers, businessmen, socialites announced that they had raised $35,000 towards a $150,000 research fellowship in neurology, to keep Dr. Tilney's memory green. The members of Tilney Memorial, Inc. have already appointed a committee to find a young man who may carry on Dr. Tilney's research on brain evolution, the relation between brain structure and human behavior.

For over 25 years modest Dr. Tilney spent long hours with his patients and his laboratory, studying brain tissues of men, apes, rats, reptiles, birds, fish. He believed that most men use only a quarter of the 14 billion cells of the brain cortex. "The brain of modern man," said he, "is only some intermediate stage in the ultimate development of the master organ of life." When man's brain finally bursts into full bloom, he prophesied, depressions and wars will disappear.

In 1925, while working 15 hours a day, Dr. Tilney was struck by cerebral thrombosis (blood clot in the brain).* For six weeks he lost the power of speech. But his mind was as keen as ever, and he gave his colleagues detailed notes on the course of his disease. The devoted doctors at the Institute took turns sleeping in his house every night, came over in a band of five to carry his heavy, inert body from his study to his bedroom. Within a few months Dr. Tilney taught himself to scribble with his left hand, in six months wrote the entire manuscript of a two-volume masterpiece, The Brain from Ape to Man. When it was published in 1928, many scientists acclaimed it as the finest piece of evolutionary writing since Darwin.

*Pasteur also had a paralytic stroke, also did some of his most important work after his recovery. The late, great Brain Surgeon Harvey Cushing, a friend of Dr. Tilney, was crippled by a nerve disease during World War I, later recovered, went back to his six-hour operations.

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