“Captain of the Citadel”: The Figure of the Mother across Wilder Penfield's Professional and Domestic Spheres

This article puts into conversation Wilder Penfield's correspondence with his mother, a novel about Hippocrates he published in 1960, and his work for the Vanier Institute of the Family. I argue that Penfield drew on an epistemology of personal experience in both medicine and family life to influence the conversation about social values and national and professional identity. Specifically, in threading connections between the medical family and the conventional family, he cast the mother/wife as a critically important figure who could help the doctor mediate between his professional and domestic worlds, while not herself being a protagonist in professional spaces. This article thus bridges the conceptual realms of the domestic and professional spheres, illuminating ideas and narratives of identity that were available to doctors and to Canadians and that shaped the cultural and professional landscapes of the twentieth century.