Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole : Eatraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain

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.

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.