title: Men of dreams and men of action: neurologists, neurosurgeons, and the performance of professional identity, 1920-1950.
abstract: In the 1930s and 1940s, neurosurgeons and clinical neurologists engaged in a fierce exchange on the scope of their specialties. Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield's rhetoric of therapeutic superiority had a strong impact both on the Rockefeller Foundation's support for his institute and on the self-fashioning of neurologists. Neurologists articulated their identity in spirited performances at the meetings of specialist societies, their response shifting from a combative approach to a focus on internal organization. In light of the neurosurgeons' discourse, by the 1950s a new generation of neurologists created a revisionist narrative that inaccurately portrayed the clinical neurologists of the past as having been uninterested in therapeutics.
authors.affiliation: History and Philosophy Science and technology, University of Toronto.
authors.forename: Delia
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Gavrus
mesh_terms: D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D007400:Interprofessional Relations; D009462:Neurology / Q000266:history*; D009493:Neurosurgery / Q000266:history*; D010686:Philosophy, Medical / Q000266:history*; D010819:Physician's Role / Q000266:history*; D012955:Societies, Medical / Q000266:history*; D014481:United States