Eric Andrew-Gee
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner of the 2025 Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Award Concordia University First Book Award and Finalist for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
The riveting true story of the star-crossed friendship between two neuroscientists—one famous, the other forgotten—who mapped the brain, but lost each other.
In the early 1920s, when neurosurgery was more likely to be a death sentence than a cure, two men revolutionized the study of the brain: Wilder Penfield and William Cone. Drawn together by their shared fascination with the “undiscovered country” inside our heads, the surgeons formed a partnership and within ten years established the Montreal Neurological Institute in a Gothic stone hospital on the slope of a mountain. The Neuro soon became the world’s leading centre for neurological study, attracting men and women from across the globe to a booming mid-century city.
But their success came at the cost of their friendship.
While Cone spent long hours at patients’ bedsides and in the blood-spattered operating room, Penfield pursued the loftier goal of discovering the seat of consciousness. The Chief, as he was known, went on to develop the Montreal procedure for treating epilepsy, which helped identify the source of speech, executive function and memory in narrow slivers of grey matter—achievements that illuminated the relationship between mind and body, made possible by Cone’s anonymous work behind the scenes. Over time, their relationship became fraught with personal and professional hurts—and suddenly ended when Cone was found dead in his office at the age of sixty-two.
In this compelling dual biography, Globe and Mail journalist Eric Andrew-Gee weaves together the rich history of The Neuro with that of Penfield and Cone to reveal the untold story of one of the birthplaces of neuroscience. In doing so, he breathes new life into a familiar hero and revives the tragic, forgotten story of his partner, writing Dr. William Cone back into the historical record at last.
