https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/brenda-milner
I am going to be sub teaching for my usual 4th grade students today and was trying to choose a book I would read to them. Because I’m going to Alaska in a few weeks, I thought of a book of stories that I typed up for Dr. Melzack at McGill—he transcribed Eskimo folklore in his “spare time” from his Psych stuff. And I typed up one of his books, “Why the Man in the Moon is Happy”. Sadly, the book costs $44 on Amazon or I’d buy it. Actually Ron gave me a copy of the typescript when I typed it those many years ago but of course I don’t have it. As I don’t have books in my library I’ve chosen a book from Kindle so that’s sorted.
And what does that have to do with Brenda Milner you ask? Well, the other prof I worked for was Peter Milner, Brenda’s ex-husband. When I worked in the office Brenda was still a formidable presence from time to time although she worked up at the Allen Institute. When she’d call Peter on the phone she had that imperious Maggie Thatcher-like quality to her voice that made me hop up and race over to Peter’s labs and he would in turn race back to take the call. I think she sailed into the office (our offices were so tiny at McGill) from time to time as well, never really acknowledging me apart from a nod. Peter had divorced her to marry his secretary—a few secretaries earlier than I—so perhaps that accounted for her disdain of secretaries. And she is still going strong at 104 years old. What a woman!
Golly, those times at McGill were fun. I lived not far away, in what was called the “McGill Ghetto”, full of students and young people, always busy no matter what time of the day it was. We had long lunch hours thanks to a very understanding admin assistant, “Miss Rose” and professors who didn’t mind us taking off with the grad students to the Greek section of Montreal for souvlaki, returning reeking of garlic, or on Fridays heading to Hillel House for $1.00 lunches of falafels and cake. Although I now feel more darkly about the kind of research that went on in the labs—McGill has a controversial reputation because of its experiments on both animals and humans starting in the 1950s—in those days we had a feeling that it was somehow necessary, this research, to untangle the puzzle of the human brain’s handling of pain and of debilitating mental illnessses. Call it rationalizing, I wouldn’t disagree.
Still, I wish I’d been less mixed up emotionally so that eventually I felt I had to move on. After I acquired a massive crush on one of Dr. Milner’s post docs who dumped me for a grad student I felt I couldn’t work in the office anymore. And so I moved on to bigger and better things.
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