The History of the University of Florida Department of Neurosurgery
The University of Florida (UF) College of Medicine opened in 1956, accepting its first medical school class. In 1958, Shands Hospital admitted its first patient. Sometime shortly thereafter, Edward Woodward, the Chair of the Surgery Department hired UF’s first neurosurgical Chief, Henry Lamar Roberts. Roberts was born in Macon, Georgia on 9/2/1919. After obtaining an MD and PhD, he trained in neurosurgery with Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute (Figure 1). He and Penfield coauthored the neurosurgical classic, “Speech and Brain Mechanisms.”1 He brought expertise in epilepsy surgery and functional neurosurgery to UF. He remained at UF until 1968 when he went into private practice in nearby Ocala.
