We treat people with seemingly implausible ailments all of the time. Each day they show up in a predictable parade of signs, symptoms, and diseases: an embolus, a glioma, a hydrocephalus; a bleed, a seizure, a hemiplegia. That's how the residents refer to the cases, as in: "Let's go see the basilar thrombosis on 10 East." When viewed in terms of actual patients, however, no day is quite like any other. After the bedside visit, the thrombosis suddenly has a name, the glioma has a wife and children, the hydrocephalus writes a column for a well-known business journal. Our coed suffering from psychosis turned out to be a Rhodes Scholarship candidate, the case of multiple strokes became a charming woman who had competed in the Junior Olympics, and the man for whom a smile was a troubling symptom owned a personal empire of six Verizon wireless stores. 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.

To become a good clinical neurologist, you have to be intensely interested by what the brain does, how it works, how it breaks down.” There were some technical details here, I didn't get it all of course, I have no history in medicine but I understood enough for the stories to make sense even without that knowledge. I wasn’t keen on the way it jumps around and between cases of similar illnesses but I get why he did it, it just didn’t work for me. There is an old joke among stand-up comics that goes: "Dying is easy, comedy is hard." If we were as inner-directed as comedians, we neurologists might say, "Trauma is easy, neurology is hard." Every one of our patients has, in effect, fallen into a hole, and it's our job is to get them out again.All went well for two years, until she returned to the hospital with sudden right facial drooping and difficulty finding words, sure signs of another stroke, but this time a stroke of a very different kind. A portion of one of the language centers of her brain had been deprived of its blood supply. Her speech was now noticeably impaired. Within a few days, she showed signs of improvement, and was again discharged on a blood thinner. At East Shore Hospital an MRI showed an ambiguous blotch on the left frontal lobe of Vincent's brain, and at the suggestion of one of his sons, a pediatrician, the family requested a transfer to us. He arrived sometime around 10:00 that morning and was brought up to the ward.

Dr. Allan H. Ropper and Brian David Burrell comprehensively explain, through the lived experiences of a number of patients, the complex and sometimes utterly bizarre nature of the brain and the things that can go wrong with it. What Burrell and Ropper produce is a portrait of an immensely talented neurologist and teacher who is always the smartest man in the room. Almost every anecdote ends with Ropper emerging the hero of the moment. It’s too carefully written to be crassly boastful, but it’s not exactly an essay in professional humility. I've rounded up the book from a very precise 2.75 to a 3 because it wasn't a bad read, just not a very good one. When you no longer have a reason to get out of bed, that’s when you’re going to take a long look at the worth of your life.”

Told in a breezy style through a series of real-life case studies, Ropper's book offers a fascinating glimpse of the ways in which our brain can go wrong. * Financial Times * You have to respect their wishes as human beings, we are told. But if you ask me whether the custom is always right, I would say, “Not at all”. The patient is so very often dead wrong, and very much so when it comes to his own brain.” Gilbert, the medical student who had made the initial exam, recorded this as "orientation times one." Even at the point where my physical symptoms were completely blatant, when you could do a physical exam and precisely locate the source of the pain, my GP was reluctant to send me for an ultrasound because, in his opinion, I was probably just stressed about my master's degree. He repeatedly asked if I was happy, if I was sure I was doing the right thing in my career, while I was trying to ask for pain relief. When eventually I pushed hard enough, he sent me for an ultrasound, warning me that I was wasting everyone's time. 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.

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease

What are you watching?" Hannah asked Vincent, in an inflection she would later inform me was Kansan rather than Missourian. Hannah was in charge. Her service, the culmination of three years as a neurological resident, had started a week before I came on board. A "service" involves running the neurology inpatient ward, admitting and discharging the patients, and directing a team consisting of three junior residents, two medical students, and a physician's assistant—a cohort that could barely squeeze into Vincent's curtained-off half of the room.