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

Ropper, Allan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782395482 ISBN 13: 9781782395485

Publisher: Atlantic, 2015

Synopsis

In this gripping book, Dr Allan Ropper takes the reader behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School's neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre, life-altering afflictions. Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr Ropper inhabits a world where absurdities abound: A figure skater whose body has become a ticking time-bomb, A salesman who drives around and around a roundabout, unable to get off, A college quarterback who can't stop calling the same play, 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 mother of two young girls, diagnosed with ALS, 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? Ropper answers these questions by taking the reader into a rarefied world where lives and minds hang in the balance.

About this title

About 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.

Brian David 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.

Review

“An entertaining and eminently readable book, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole. Demystifying the art and practice of healing neurological disorders, he turns a keen eye on his patients, interviewing them and recounting stories straight from the hospital front.” ―Huffington Post

“Dr. Ropper comes through as the very model of a modern neurologist, an elegant combination of Fast Medicine and Slow Medicine, expert in the panoply of diagnostic techniques developed since Hippocrates: from clinical neurologic exam to MRI to neuropathology lab. What he models for us is the essence of good doctoring attention, carefulness, and Oslerian dedication; he throws in, for good measure, his own irony and humor. Listening to the Brain is well written and intriguing, deep but light; it reveals the complexity, the demands, the satisfactions and the regrets of what it means to be a true physician.” ―Elizabeth Loftus, author of The Myth of Repressed Memory

Edition details

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