Pierre Gloor
Physician, Brain Scientist & Historian
by William Feindel, MDCM, DPhil, FRCS(C)
Peter Gloor fulfilled many roles as medical doctor, brain scientist, teacher, author, humanist and, to so many of us, a good friend. He added his own particular dimension to the Neuro over the past fifty years.
Peter completed his medical studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 1948 when he was 25. He studied neurology and neurosurgery at Hôpital Louis-Pasteur in Colmar for the next three years, a period reflected in his first twelve publications on neurosurgical problems and the monitoring of general anesthesia by EEG. Awarded a Fellowship of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, Peter came to the Montreal Neurological Institute early in 1952.
Shortly after his arrival he joined me in the Neurophysiology Laboratory to elucidate the role of the amygdala in epilepsy. Dr Penfield and I had shown a few months earlier in the operating room, working with Dr Jasper, that the amygdala played a crucial role in the generation of seizures coming from the temporal lobe and characterized by automatism and amnesia. As I wrote earlier about our experiences in that 7th-floor lab, "those were exciting days – and nights. Peter and I would start the experiments in the early morning and continue well past midnight, often seeing the sunrise before we folded up reams of EEG paper regurgitated from an ancient Offner machine that recorded our results." Peter at that time was fond of "Cizane" cigarettes with their strong mixture of Turkish tobacco. One of our serendipitous findings was a spontaneous seizure discharge from the electrode in the amygdala which we soon attributed to a smoking Cizane that lay on the operating table and was evidently stimulating the animal’s olfactory system. We never published that observation.
As
two residents in training, scheduled soon to go on the clinical services, we
worked hard for four months and published our findings
in the EEG Journal in 1954. In that paper we listed fewer
than twenty references found from an assiduous literature search in the Neuro
Library. This morning on the Web, I clicked onto "Google" for the subject "Amygdala". I
received "about 
173,000" hits and the interesting piece of informa-tion,
"Search took 0.26 seconds". Quite a change in fifty years! Peter pursued this
topic for his PhD thesis, and continued these studies to become a world authority on the
anatomy and physiology of the amygdala.
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