New Book
A noted neurologist challenges widespread misunderstandings about brain disease and mental illness. Why do we think of mental illness as a brain disease? Is there a difference between a sick mind and a sick brain? How the Brain Lost Its Mind, written by a prominent neurologist and a student of medical history, traces the origins of our ideas about insanity and the collision course that simply reduces the mind to the connections between nerve cells. Starting with syphilis of the brain, the disease that made insanity a medical problem and started the field of psychiatry, the authors study a host of famous and infamous characters–among them van Gogh, the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, Guy de Maupassant, and Al Capone. How the Brain Lost Its Mind explains how we have twisted ourselves into the medicalization of every minor mood and thought, each with a pill to cure the psychopathology of ordinary daily life. How are we to understand serious disorders such as schizophrenia and Tourette’s syndrome, in which the brain under the microscope is entirely normal? By delving into an overlooked history, this book shows how neuroscience and brain scans alone cannot account for a robust mental life, or a deeply disturbed one.
About the Author:
Allan H. Ropper, M.D., is Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Raymond D. Adams Master Clinician of the Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is also a deputy editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, Royal College of Physicians, and the American College of Physicians. Dr. Ropper is an author of the most widely consulted textbook of neurology, Principles of Neurology, currently in its eleventh edition, and co-author with Brian David Burrell of Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole.
Brian David Burrell is a member of the mathematics faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A teacher and writer, he is the author is several books, including Postcards from the Brain Museum, The Words We Live By, and, jointly with Dr. Allan H. Ropper, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole. He is an authority on brain collections worldwide, and has discussed his work on NBC’s Today Show, C-SPAN’s Booknotes, and NPR’s Morning Edition.
How the Brain Lost Its Mind by Allan H. Ropper, Brian Burrell, read by Fred Sanders
How the Brain Lost Its Mind by Allan H. Ropper, Brian Burrell Reviews:
“I have listened to, watched, and read Allan Ropper on subjects related to the brain for thirty years. He’s still my teacher, but I’ve never seen him teach like this. Along with his friend and gifted co-author, Ropper takes us on a romp through centuries of cultural and scientific history. There’s a kicker: can that history clarify and crystallize through the lens of just one nasty disease? Yes. Read how in this page-turningly accessible and brilliant book.”—Edison K. Miyawaki, MD, assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School; author of The Frontal Brain and Language
“A page-turner vividly depicting the struggles of medicine’s perennial sibling rivals: neurology and psychiatry. The dramatic interactions between clinical investigators and patients—occasionally one and the same—demonstrate how ideas relating mind to brain pervasively influence our sense of ourselves.”—Paul McHugh, MD, Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
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