Loading question...
You are in free guest mode. Timed Practice Revision List Attempt History Progress Tracking Create a free account to unlock these tools
Back to Questions
Prev Next
CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63151 Medium Wilder Penfield and the Montreal procedure

Read the following passage.

A. Wilder Penfield was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1891. At Princeton University he was a good student who also excelled in sports, and his classmates voted him 'best all-round man'. A Rhodes Scholarship then took him to Merton College at Oxford, in England, where the neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington first introduced him to the study of the brain. He later completed his medical degree at Johns Hopkins University and trained under the surgeon Harvey Cushing in Boston. In 1921 he took up a position at Columbia University and Presbyterian Hospital in New York, where he practised surgery for seven years.

B. In 1928 McGill University recruited Penfield from New York. He came with a clear vision: an institute where clinicians and scientists from different fields would work side by side. He persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to endow the new centre and to fund the construction of its building. The Montreal Neurological Institute, known today as the Neuro, opened under his leadership in 1934, the same year he became a Canadian citizen. He retired as its director in 1960 but went on taking part in its activities.

C. The operation that Penfield and his colleagues developed for epilepsy became known as the Montreal procedure, and they published their findings in 1952. The surgeons used local anesthetics, so the patient stayed awake while parts of the brain were stimulated with electricity and could describe the sensations this caused. One woman, for example, reported smelling burnt toast before a seizure. Such reports helped the team to find the cells where seizures started and destroy them. Using the information gained in many hundreds of brain operations, Penfield also created functional maps of the brain's surface and was the first to map accurately the areas relating to speech.

D. In his later years Penfield wrote novels and medical biographies, and he died in Montreal in 1976. Opinion of some of his findings has since shifted. He reported that stimulation made some patients aware of a previous experience, as though a strip of film had been set in motion within the brain. In a psychology textbook published in 1967, however, Ulric Neisser argued that the content of these experiences was comparable to dreams rather than literal recall. Later researchers have also asked why Penfield's findings are so rarely replicated in modern operations, and the question has not been settled.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

 - 1. He left New York mainly because McGill offered him a much larger salary.

 - 2. His aim was a place that would bring medical care and scientific research together.

 - 3. Patients remained conscious during the operation so that they could say what they felt.

 - 4. Before moving to McGill, he spent some years operating on patients in New York.

 - 5. A later expert doubted that the scenes his patients reported were true recollections.

 - 6. A scholarship paid for his studies in England.

 - 7. He became Canadian in the year the Neuro first opened its doors.

 - 8. Most people who went through his special operation were free of attacks for the rest of their lives.

 - 9. The brain maps he produced drew on evidence from a very large number of surgeries.

With a free account: Retry and compare every attempt.
Be the first! No community answers here yet — submit yours and help others learn.
Saving...