Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain - Softcover

Ropper, Allan; Burrell, Brian David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782395482 ISBN 13: 9781782395485

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2015

Synopsis

What is it like to try to heal the body when the mind is under attack? In this gripping and illuminating book, Dr Allan Ropper reveals the extraordinary stories behind some of the life-altering afflictions that he and his staff are confronted with at the Neurology Unit of Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Neurologists diagnose and treat serious illnesses of the brain by combining the hard science of medical knowledge with the art of intuitive reasoning. The unique challenge they face is that their primary sources of information - the patients' brains - are quite often altered, sometimes bizarrely, as a result of disease. Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr Ropper inhabits a place where absurdities abound: a sportsman who starts spouting gibberish; an undergraduate who suddenly becomes psychotic; a salesman who drives around and around a roundabout, unable to get off; a child molester who, after falling on the ice, is left with a brain that is very much dead inside a body that is very much alive; a figure skater whose body has become a ticking time-bomb; a mother who has to decide whether a life locked inside her own head is worth living.

How does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr Ropper answers these questions by taking the reader into a world where lives and minds hang in the balance.

About this title

Review

Peppered with insights into the scientific method, emphasizing that it's not the cold, rational, Sherlock Holmes-like deductive process it's often portrayed to be. Medical writing at its best. * V. S. Ramachandran, bestselling author of The Tell-Tale Brain * Fantastic . . . This peek inside the sick brain, by a foremost neurologist, helps readers truly appreciate how calamities like brain tumors, stroke, Parkinson's, seizures and other diseases affect us. His stories are sometimes painful, sometimes heartwarming, but invariably tremendously illuminating. * Elizabeth Loftus, author of The Myth of Repressed Memory * An in-the-trenches exploration of the challenging world of the clinical neurologist. From the quotidian to the exotic, from the heart-breaking to the humorous, the authors present an honest and compelling look at one of medicine's most fascinating specialties. * Dr Michael Collins, author of Hot Lights, Cold Steel *

From the Author

Dr Allan H. Ropper is a Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Raymond D. Adams Master Clinician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He is credited with founding the field of neurological intensive care and counts Michael J. Fox among his patients.

B. D. Burrell is the author of Postcards from the Brain Museum. He has appeared on the Today Show, Booknotes, and NPR's Morning Edition. He divides his time between writing and statistical research with neuroscientific applications.

Edition details

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1782395482
• ISBN 13: 9781782395485
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272