When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery - Softcover

Frank T. Vertosick Jr.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393330494 ISBN 13: 9780393330496

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008

Synopsis

Chronicles the author's evolution from naive and ambitious young houseman to world-class neurosurgeon. This book describes some of the challenges of the author's career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumour in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia and a clergyman with a.22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull.

About this title

Review:

Dramatic, moving, and utterly fascinating.

By turns comic and tragic, this memoir...is a must-read for neurosurgeons but also of interest to most clinicians.--Chris Barrett

Dr. Frank Vertosick provides an amusing, insightful and honest inside view of the training of the neurosurgeon. This highly readable account of daily life on the wards shows all the humility, fortitude, and humanity that genuinely underlies this sometimes not well-understood but genuinely wonderful profession.--Dr. David W. Roberts, professor of surgery (neurosurgery), Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center

When the Air Hits Your Brain lets you feel the pain, grief and joy of practicing medicine. This book should be read by every medical student, doctor and present or potential patient. In other words, by all of us.--Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of Love, Medicine and Miracles

Writing with humor and compassion, but without sentimentality, Vertosick shows us that neurosurgeons, those gods of the operating room, are humans, too.

Synopsis:

With poignant insight and humour, "When the Air Hits Your Brain" chronicles a man's evolution from naive and ambitious young houseman to world-class neurosurgeon. In electrifying detail, Frank Vertosick Jr describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumour in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia and a clergyman with a.22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick's patients and unsparing yet fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, "When the Air Hits Your Brain" - the culmination of decades spent struggling to learn an unforgiving craft - illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0393330494
• ISBN 13: 9780393330496
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272