How the Brain Lost Its Mind: Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness

A noted neurologist challenges widespread misunderstandings about brain disease and mental illness.

Why do we think of mental illness as a brain disease? Is there a difference between a sick mind and a sick brain? How the Brain Lost Its Mind, written by a prominent neurologist and a student of medical history, traces the origins of our ideas about insanity and the collision course that simply reduces the mind to the connections between nerve cells. Starting with syphilis of the brain, the disease that made insanity a medical problem and started the field of psychiatry, the authors study a host of famous and infamous characters--among them van Gogh, the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, Guy de Maupassant, and Al Capone.

How the Brain Lost Its Mind explains how we have twisted ourselves into the medicalization of every minor mood and thought, each with a pill to cure the psychopathology of ordinary daily life. How are we to understand serious disorders such as schizophrenia and Tourette's syndrome, in which the brain under the microscope is entirely normal? By delving into an overlooked history, this book shows how neuroscience and brain scans alone cannot account for a robust mental life, or a deeply disturbed one.

Allan H. Ropper, M.D., is professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and Raymond D. Adams Master Clinician of the Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He is also a deputy editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, the Royal College of Physicians, and the American College of Physicians. Dr. Ropper is an author of the most widely consulted textbook of neurology, Principles of Neurology, currently in its eleventh edition, and coauthor with Brian David Burrell of Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole.

Brian David Burrell is a member of the mathematics faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A teacher and writer, he is the author of several books, including Postcards from the Brain Museum, The Words We Live By, and, jointly with Dr. Allan H. Ropper, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole. He is an authority on brain collections worldwide, and has discussed his work on NBC's Today, C-SPAN's Booknotes, and NPR's Morning Edition.