First published 2024
The human brain controls everything we do despite weighing only three and a half pounds. Neurosurgeon Theodore Schwartz opens the doors to one of New York's busiest hospitals to show what brain surgery actually involves. Every moment in the operating room carries life or death consequences. Schwartz traces the field's evolution from its early twentieth century beginnings through the dark era of lobotomies to current research on how contact sports damage athletes' brains. He combines rigorous medical insight with accessible storytelling to explain how surgeons learned to operate on the organ that keeps us alive and shapes our identity. This warm yet precise account reveals the complexity behind a specialty that rivals rocket science in difficulty. Readers discover both the technical challenges surgeons face and the human stories that unfold when doctors must literally get inside someone's head.
Genres: biography, neuroscience, medical, non-fiction, history-of-medicine, history-of-science
Vibes: accessible, compelling, intimate, rigorous, thought-provoking
Tropes: expert-perspective, historical-evolution, human-stories, technical-explanation
Setting: New York
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century, early-twentieth-century
512 pages · Paperback · Oneworld Publications
Content warnings: death, medical-trauma