Frederick Tilney

It was to the wistaria fronts of old Brooklyn houses that Frederick Tilney liked to turn in memory of his youthful days. He received his early medical education there, at the Long Island College of Medicine, and never lost his interest in the institution or the community. Before that he went to Yale and there, as an editor of “Lit” gained an interest in the English language that never deserted him. Two years as a reporter on Charles A. Dana’s Sun doubtless ripened the ability. All his life he was an effective speaker, thanks first of all to a fine, ready vocabulary and second to a sense of humor mellowed by sentiment.

His long and distinguished career as a neurologist culminated in his service first as Professor of Neurology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and later as Medical Director of the Neurological Institute. His writings began with the magnum opus of “The Brain, from Ape to Man,” in two volumes, and covered a wide field from the brain and the nervous system to the glands. Yet throughout his researches his colleagues felt a singleness of aim and a mental passion centering in the relationship between the phenomena of behavior and the brain, its development and structure. In pursuit thereof he devoted years of study to the correlation between brain and behavior in a variety of mammals, ranging from opossum, rat, guinea-pig, and cat to man. The peculiar sensory equipment of Helen Keller and Laura Bridgman yielded significant conclusions under his study.

His honors were endless. His breadth of interest was recorded in the long list of scientific societies of which he was a member. For four years he was editor of the Neurological Bulletin and for fifteen years a member of the editorial board of the Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry. Yet despite these professional absorptions he found time to enter the public arena and battle for civic betterment, whether the cause was the cleaning of the city streets or the problems of education.

A terrible blow struck Tilney in 1925. Overworked, unremitting in his expenditure of himself, he sustained a left cerebral thrombosis which produced total aphasia and a paralysis of the right side. For six weeks he could not speak a word. He told a friend afterward that he was most interested at the time in watching himself and realizing that during that period his internal speech and his quality of intellect were intact. Recovery was never entire. A limp was with him ever after and the function of the right hand was greatly impaired. Nevertheless, during the winter of 1926, while he was slowly reassembling his forces in his armchair, he taught himself to write with his left hand and with it in that six months he wrote the entire manuscript of “The Brain, from Ape to Man.” The Centurion who set down this record of courage, concluded in these words:

“It is strange under what handicaps so many men of large stature have done their work. Darwin, never able to work more than one or two hours at a time without sustaining unbearable headache; Parkman, writing the history of this continent though unable, by blindness, himself to seek necessary references for his work; and Tilney, using his seclusion as an opportunity to enlarge our knowledge of the organ in which disaster had almost cost him his life.”

Geoffrey Parsons
1938 Century Memorials