Chance for Elizabeth

When Elizabeth was 16 months old, she fell from her high chair and cracked her skull. Two months later she began to have epileptic attacks. Sometimes her eyes fluttered and her head jerked; in later years, she sometimes could not remember, after attacks, what had happened. In school, she occasionally read words backwards, although she was considered above average in intelligence.

Five years ago a neurosurgeon in Houston, her home town, operated and removed a scar from the brain, but she was better only temporarily and then got worse. One day early this month, Elizabeth, now 18, and her mother climbed out of a plane at Montreal's Dorval Airport. Like many another sufferer from epilepsy, Elizabeth was headed for McGill University's famed affiliate, Montreal Neurological Institute.

The Team. In the institute's eight-story stone building on the slope of Mount Royal, Dr. Wilder Penfield, the director and one of the world's top brain specialists, set to work with his staff. Explained Dr. Penfield to Elizabeth's mother: "This problem can only be solved by teamwork. You can't hope to win nowadays by any other method."

How did the team tackle Elizabeth's problem? In all, 15 of the institute's doctors examined her and made recommendations. She spent hours in the brain-wave laboratory and found it "great fun" to sit in a soundproof room while little wires ran out like pigtails in all directions from her scalp. Doctors explained that a pen, attached to each wire, was tracing the brain's electrical waves. The only one that showed abnormal tracings led from the spot of her childhood injury--the exact spot to be operated on.

The Task. Last fortnight, in the operating room, Elizabeth was given only local anesthesia; she had to guide Surgeon Penfield's hands by telling him of her sensations. At one point she said: "I feel as though my left hand were moving but it isn't moving." During the eight-hour operation the surgeons took out about two square inches of damaged brain.

Last week, Elizabeth was wearing a saucy cone of green felt on her head to conceal the place that was shaved during the operation. She was well enough to board a plane for home. She was bright and cheerful; there were no signs of nervous symptoms. She would have a long rest; then, if the operation had been a complete success, a new future.

Cases like Elizabeth's have become almost routine at the institute. Last year 904 major operations were performed. Under Dr. Penfield, the institute has won an international reputation, attracted doctors and research fellows from all over the world. The institute houses both a hospital and McGill's neurological laboratories; when they are not treating patients, Dr. Penfield and his staff teach neurology and neurosurgery to McGill's medical students.

Says soft-spoken Dr. Penfield: "It is our task to accept the most desperate sufferers whether they come from farm, mine, factory, city, street, the home, or from other hospitals. We undertake apparently hopeless cases referred to us by doctors everywhere."

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