Kenneth George Mckenzie: And the Founding of Neurosurgery in Canada

In the history of modern Canadian science and medicine, Kenneth McKenize, Edward Archibald, Wilder Penfield and Harry Botterell represent the generation of medical practitioners who came into their own as neurosurgery was establishing itself in the late years of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

With the exception of Penfield, the history and literature of these pioneers is little known outside academic circles, medical archives and libraries.

But it was Kenneth McKenzie, in a life spent searching to improve his skills in diagnosis and in the operating room, who gained supremacy as a skilled surgeon and a wise and precise diagnostician. It was McKenzie who took neurosurgery out of the realm of general surgery and established it as a specialty at Toronto General Hospital, Toronto’s pre-eminent teaching hospital.

In a remarkable, thirty-year career dedicated to the art and technique of neurosurgery - at a time when the successful outcome of an operation depended on neuro-anatomic knowledge, gentleness in handling nervous tissue, dexterity, dispatch and experience - McKenzie led the way as an innovator and inventor to perfect the surgeon's art.