Author: Vertosick, Frank Jr., M.D.
Call Number: 617.48 V568W 1996
Book Description from amazon.com:
The story of one man's evolution from naive and ambitious young intern to world-class neurosurgeon.
With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick’s patients and unsparing yet fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain―the culmination of decades spent struggling to learn an unforgiving craft―illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.My Read:
Page 176-"The professor removed his glasses and began cleaning them slowly, squinting up at the high ceiling as he continued his dissertation.'These facts matter a great deal. What patient does for a living, what his background is, what level of education he has achieved...all of these issues must be addressed in great detail in order to put his complaints and his disease in the proper context. If I ask a man to take the square root of 100 and he cannot. I might take this as proof of a left-hemispheric brain tumor, unless I know he has worked on a farm since childhood and never attended school. Likewise, I might find it normal that a patient could not tell me the current exchange rate of the pound in Japanese yen. But if I knew that person was a merchant banker, on the other hand, ignorance of this fact would indicate a grave illness indeed! Americans have grown so dependent upon their scanning toys that they fail to view the patient as a multidimensional person. To have the audacity to cut into a person's brain without the slightest clue of his life, his occupation...I find that most simply appalling.'"
Personally, I found page 234 to page 238 very interesting in this book.
No comments:
Post a Comment