I’m reading Wilder Penfield ’s autobiography, for work, and noticed that he was kind of a blogger.
He was a very good writer, and there is lots of detail in the book, even though he wrote about events decades after the fact. The detail comes from weekly letters to his mother. No matter where he was in the world, no matter how busy he was, he would take time to write his mom and tell her who he met and what he learned and discovered, and how he felt about his career. His mother typed up all the letters and Penfield later used her collection to write his biography.
Penfield obviously loved writing, and that is explicitly clear from this segment, which describes how he set out to write a book together with his collaborator and coworker William Cone :
“To my surprise, Bill Cone found writing difficult. He would turn, with evident relief, away from the half-written page and focus instead of the care of our patients. This he carried out with tireless enthusiasm. Or he applied himself to the perfecting of technique in laboratory and operating room and he did this with equal delight. In short, Cone was a doer and a reader, not a creative writer (…)”
Some people are not meant to write, and you will find lots of them in science. They know everything, they can do everything, and the lab would fall apart without them – but they are not good writers. These are the people who do not want to start a blog. Penfield clearly would have liked to, and, had he lived half a century later, he probably would have done just that.
snort
Heh. It was more the weekly letters that I thought made him a blogger, but other than that, the book is pretty good – especially for a blogger, you know.
I really need to read this autobiography… thanks for the tip. One thing that always makes me giggle when I visit the McGill campus is the street named “Avenue Docteur Penfield”, which is really a silly homonculous of a name. Of course, the anglophones just refer to it as “Doctor Penfield”, in a glorious example of Canadian pragmatism.
I am almost certainly off-topic now.
More Penfield quotes (I have to give the book back, so I’m jotting these down here for my own notes as much as for your pleasure)
Now read the book .