A. Earl Walker

1958, San Francisco, CA

A. Earl Walker, the distinguished guest of honor in 1958, was born in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1907. He graduated from both the undergraduate and medical schools of the University of Alberta.

He interned at the Provincial Mental Institution of Edmonton, Alberta, from 1929 to 1930 and at the Toronto Western Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, from 1930 to 1931.

As this volume shows, his background in neurologic surgery was firmly established under an outstanding neurologist, Dr. Roy Grinker; a Cushingtrained, original thinking, neurologic surgeon, Dr. Percival Bailey; and one of the fathers of American neurophysiology, Dr. John Fulton, at Yale. He served his residency in neurologic surgery at the University of Chicago Clinics, and from 1935 to 1936 he was a Rockefeller Fellow in Neurophysiologic Research at Yale. He held a position in neuroanatomic research at the Neurologische Klinik in Amsterdam, Holland, in 1937 and in the same year did research in neurophysiology at Brussels, Belgium.

From 1937 to 1947 he was professor of neurosurgery at the University of Chicago and in charge of this section, and in 1947 he was made the neurosurgeon-in-chief at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. His predecessors in this particular position included Harvey Cushing and Walter Dandy. During his training period in neurophysiology he published a text, The Primate Thalamus, which has been regarded as one of the outstanding contributions about the thalamus.

He has been regarded as both a thinking and practical surgeon of outstanding ability. He has always been a recognized authority on electroencephalography and has been one of the chief contributors in this field in the past. His bibliography at the age of 52 includes several texts and over 200 articles concerning various phases of neurologic surgery. His clinical interest and originality in epilepsy and surgery of the brain stem have taken firm background from experimental work performed in Dr. Fulton's laboratory.

During World War II he was in charge of the Neurosurgical Section of the Cushing General Hospital. All of the cases of posttraumatic epilepsy from the United States Army were sent to this hospital for evaluation. His statistics, which have been published recently, have constituted an extremely informative series of facts about posttraumatic epilepsy with a follow-up period of 10 years.

His resident and laboratory staffs at The Johns Hopkins Hospital have included men from many parts of the world. He has insisted on his men being well grounded in neurologic surgery and all of its allied fields. He has been extremely active in experimental work in the past and has also been extremely active in international neurosurgical circles, being asked to give lectureships on an honorary basis throughout various countries of the globe.