Head and shoulders image of Dr. William H. Feindel, associate professor of Neurosurgery, Department of Medicine.

Bio/Historical Note: Dr. William Howard Feindel was born in 1918 in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. He received a BA in Biology from Acadia University in 1939, an MSc from Dalhousie University in 1942, and an MD, CM, from McGill University in 1945. Attending Merton College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar he received his DPhil in 1949. After completing his residency Dr. Feindel was in neurosurgical practice for two years with Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute. In 1955 he founded the Neurosurgical Department at University Hospital in Saskatoon. In 1959 Dr. Feindel re-joined the Montreal Neurological Institute where he founded the William Cone Laboratory for Neurosurgical Research and became the first William Cone Professor of Neurosurgery and then director of the MNI from 1972-1984. During this tenure he led a clinical neuroscience team to acquire the first CAT and combined MRI/S units in Canada and to develop the world's first PET system utilizing a prototype Japanese "Baby" cyclotron and the MNI-designed BGO crystal PET scanner for detecting brain tumours and stroke. Dr. Feindel integrated these systems into a Brain Imaging Center (BIC), within a major extension of the MNI, opened in 1984 and since then recognized as a leading world center for clinical diagnosis, teaching and research in neuro-imaging. In the early 1950s, during brain mapping studies with Penfield and Jasper, Dr. Feindel discovered the role of the amygdala in patients with temporal lobe seizures, which, with related studies at the MNI, led to the operation of antero-mesial temporal lobe resection often referred to as "the Montreal procedure", an operation adopted worldwide for the surgical cure of many thousands of patients with epilepsy. Dr. Feindel was curator of the Wilder Penfield Archive. He was awarded an honourary Doctor of Laws degree from the U of S in 1986. He was chancellor of Acadia University from 1991-1996 and then Honourary Governor. In 1998 he was elected Honourary Osler Librarian by the Board of Curators of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University. At the 2005 Neuro Convocation, Dr. Feindel was given a Lifetime Achievement Award of the Montreal Neurological Institute. He was senior consultant in Neurosurgery and professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University and director of the Neuro-History Project at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Dr. Feindel died in 2014 at the Montreal Neurological Institute at age 95.