by Erica Good at the Undark: Many years ago, I read a book about neurosurgery by a journalist who had undergone an operation for a brain hemorrhage. One anecdote is still vivid in my memory: a story about a neurosurgical resident who was slowly drilling a burr hole in a patient’s skull when the drill suddenly jammed and then broke through, plunging the equipment into the brain and killing the patient.
No such misadventure is included in “Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery,” although the author, Theodore H. Schwartz, cautions that neurosurgeons wielding power drills must develop enough skill “to know exactly when to stop” to avoid just such disastrous accidents from occurring.
But there are other medical mishaps and misjudgments described in this sprawling book, examples that Schwartz, a neurosurgeon at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, uses to underscore both the risks of mucking around in the brain and the scientific and medical advances that have emerged from doing so.
In an early chapter, Schwartz, who specializes in brain tumors and epilepsy and is known for his expertise in minimally invasive neurosurgery, describes making a serious mistake himself: As a first-year resident, he accidentally grabbed a vial of potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride, and handed it over to be injected into a patient’s IV, triggering a cardiac arrest. He quickly admitted his error to the senior resident, he writes — “Don’t tell anyone what you just told me,” he reports that she said — allowing her to save the patient’s life.
“Gray Matters” is not quite a memoir, not quite a history, not quite a medical thriller, not quite an anatomy text, but at different points it seems to aspire to each of these things.
Virtually everything that can harm the human brain is contained in the book’s more than 500 pages, from tumors and gunshot wounds to sports injuries, shaken baby syndrome, aneurysms, and psychosurgery.
In the prologue, Schwartz ushers his readers into the operating room, where he is about to operate on a patient who has a tumor just behind the left eye. He intends to take out the malignancy not in the traditional manner — with a craniotomy, removing a slab of bone from the side of the patient’s skull — but by accessing the brain through the eye socket.
A few days before, he had met with the man to discuss the surgery. “My goal is to project calmness and confidence,” he writes, “like an airline pilot letting the passengers know they are headed into a bit of turbulence but that everything will be fine.”
More here.
