The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons

Title: The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and RecoveryAuthor: Sam Kean
Pub Date: 2014
Genre: Medical History
Nutshell: The series of bizarre, horrifying and macabre circumstances that led to today's knowledge of neurology

I am a sucker for popular medical history and science. If you can tell it without requiring an actual medical degree, I'll probably be interested. I got my start with historical epidemiology (still my great passion, if it could be called that), but since then I've branched out into other interests. There are a few writers that can take something pretty complex (the brain is, you must admit, one of the more complex organs in the body) and make it entertaining and interesting enough that a layperson will enjoy reading about it. This is one of those authors, and this is one of those books.

Kean's book gives a good overall history of mankind's attempts to study the human brain and what exactly goes wrong with it and why. For most of our brief history with experimentation, we've simply been forced to wait until something catastrophic happened, and then sort of poke around in there and see what looked different. Sometimes that actually yielded results. We get a look at the different parts of the brain, what bits are responsible for what, and how scientists and doctors came by that information. As with a lot of medical experimentation in the past, some of the stories are certainly less than ethical. Some scientists in the olden days didn't necessarily lose sleep over shocking the brains of the mentally disabled in order to see what happened, or sticking unwashed fingers into holes in people's skulls at times. 

The things that makes this book unique among a lot of other medical histories are the stories it details. Unlike a lot of medical research, most of the real work that's been done on the brain has had to do, by the very nature of the organ, with living people. A dead brain doesn't really yield much. So much of what brain damage and brain regeneration is has to be observed in living patients, and Kean does a really good job of telling the stories of the people who contributed, oftentimes just with their initials, to science simply by having something happen to them and being observed. You get to know the people affected in a way that other medical histories don't always allow for, and that's interesting. It makes the book more personal, and better to read.

Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone with an interest in medical history in general or the brain in particular. It's definitely written with laypersons in mind, and all the jargon is explained. There are even cute little rebus puzzles at the beginning of each chapter, if you care to try your hand at them. The answers are usually fairly obvious once you start reading.