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

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 BMA MEDICAL BOOK AWARDS One of the world's leading neurologists reveals the extraordinary stories behind some of the brain disorders that he and his staff at the Harvard Medical School endeavour to treat. 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. 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 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? Dr Ropper answers these questions by taking the reader into a world where lives and minds hang in the balance.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Queen - What neurologists do 1: Six Improbable Things Before Breakfast - Arrivals, departures, and delays on the ward 2: Like a Hole in the Head - Where baseball and neurology converge in a game-saving, over-the-shoulder catch 3: The State of Confusion - Two characters in search of a neurologist 4: My Man Godfrey - A poor sort of memory that only works backwards 5: What Seems to Be the Problem? - A politically incorrect guide to malingering, shamming, and hysteria 6: Do No Harm - A walking time bomb tests the limits of good sense 7: A Story Is Worth a Thousand Pictures - Nine songs of innocence and experience 8: Endgame - Facing down Lou Gehrig's disease 9: The Examined Life - What it takes to survive a motor-neuron death sentence 10: The Curse of the Werewolf - On the front lines in the battle against Dr. Parkinson's disease 11: For the Want of a Nail - A hard-knock lesson on the way to the morgue 12: The Eyes Have It - When is somebody not dead yet? 13: Boats Against the Current - Based on a true story Epilogue: Epilogue to the 2025 Edition

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. 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.

Review :
Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole tells it like it is on the front line of clinical neurology. Engagingly written, informative, often funny, it also manages to be moving without slipping into the sentimentality that too often infests medical writing... If ever anything goes wrong with my brain, I'd like a doctor like Ropper to help sort me out. Ropper charts his 40-year career using dozens of case histories: think Oliver Sacks meets Gregory House, with a sprinkling of a hypochondriac's worst nightmare. Each tale illuminates the remarkable way, not just in which the brain works, but how Ropper diagnoses what is going on. 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. Allan Ropper's new memoir, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole, has the hard-boiled style of a Raymond Chandler novel. Like a real-life Dr House, Ropper follows hunches and has sudden startling insights. 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. 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. 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. Fascinating Filled with patient histories and puzzling symptoms waiting to be understood, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole is a detective novel, and despite his flapping white coat and squeaking Crocs, Ropper is Humphrey Bogart, cerebral yet tough and blessed with a terse wit. In the hands of a lesser writer, this book might have been nothing more than a collection of colorful tales about the many ways a human brain can break down. But Dr. Ropper and Mr. Burrell manage to tell a more profound story about the value of men over machines.