The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean

Author:Sam Kean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science / Life Sciences / Neuroscience, Science / History, Science / Life Sciences / General, Science / Life Sciences / Biology, Science / General
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

PART IV

BELIEFS AND DELUSIONS

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Sacred Disease

In this section we shift from the physical brain to the mental brain. Common sense tells us there’s a sharp distinction between the physical and the mental, but diseases like epilepsy show how fuzzy the boundaries are.

Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield had waited days for the letter about his sister, and when it arrived, he felt stupid, so stupid. A telegram a few days before had said little, only enough to distress him: that his sister Ruth was ailing, and that she and their mother had boarded a train from Los Angeles to Montreal, to seek his professional opinion. The letter that arrived on December 1, 1928, explained more. It said that Ruth, then forty-three, had suffered an increasing number of seizures in the past decade. These had included one two-day barrage of fits and one giant convulsion that required CPR to revive her. Now fits shook her almost daily, and she seemed likely to die without treatment.

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