In The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, Sam Kean travels through time with stories of startling peculiarity and incredible fascination, stories of neurological curiosities: phantom limbs, cannibalism, Siamese brains and a plethora of other strange, though equally fascinating things.
Kean effortlessly ties historical accounts, stories of madness and insanity, with the scientific breakthroughs that often followed.
The first chapter begins with Kean setting the stage of a historic jousting match between King Henri II of France and Gabriel Montgomery.
After jousting with Montgomery once, Henri demanded that he go a second time (which broke the laws of chivalry and good sport).
Vesalius was a royal surgeon in a different court, best known for writing and illustrating the book De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, which represented a significant advancement in anatomical knowledge and artwork using contemporary renaissance techniques.
This is the medical discovery/advancement that would set the stage for generations to come: the fact that brain damage could be present despite no obvious fractures or surface wounds.
The man, arguably insane before his attempt to kill the president, had endured a lot in his life such as divorce and being relentlessly made fun of by many groups of people for his unsightly appearance.
Of course, Spitzka found holes in his gray matter and extensive damage to the tissue that "nourished neurons".
The man had a similar past to that of Guiteau, and planned to murder president William McKinley as to secure his own party's political candidate in the White House.
This is true to some extent, though for adults, while they cannot regrow neurons, they can rewire circuits in their brains with hard work.
This chapter starts with the introduction of mutilés, men who had various parts of their faces blown off by the metal weapons used in the Great War.
An American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd traveled and set up a business for these men, and she would create faces for them out of plaster and ceramic and paint, making them startlingly realistic.
Related, a Japanese scientist Tatsuji Inouye examines soldiers who had been shot through their visual cortex during battle and lost random spots of vision.
For example, if the visual cortex suffers damage, the person afflicted will lose many things, one of which being basic perceptual skills.
Kean begins the chapter with the sad (fictional) tale of George Dedlow, protagonist of a short story by Silas Weir Mitchell.
George Dedlow had fought in the Civil War and in turn had both his arms and both his legs amputated for various reasons.
The Laughing Disease, later referred to as kuru, originated in Papua, New Guinea in the tribe of the Fore (For-ay) people.
The slow rise of this disease caught the attention of one D. Carleton Gajdusek, a doctor who specialized in pediatrics with a strange affinity for microbes and their spread.
After a long investigation of kuru, and as hundreds of people were dying from it, the phrase "slow virus" was brought about.
For instance, if you were to inject dye into the bloodstream, every organ would turn that color except for the brain due to the BBB.
Unrelated, after Gajdusek returned after his kuru investigations, he was revealed to be a pedophile after admitting to touching young boys that he had picked up as his children in Papua, New Guinea.
He sent his assistant, William Sharp, to retrieve this gland from a giant who had just died, among other things such as the heart, the lungs, and the brain.
After retrieving the organs in a hurry, Sharp was brutally yelled at by Cushing because he had forgotten a part he hadn't even known existed.
He often sought out circuses and freak shows in hopes that they would have a giant or a dwarf, and often stopped to talk with them about their lives and their pasts.
The pair experimented on monkeys, removing parts of their brains (the temporal lobes) and getting disastrous and disturbing results.
The sacred disease is epilepsy, called so because many felt as if their soul met a higher power: God, in some cases.
He slid two metal electrodes into her brain and started a generator, causing her to move her arms and legs about wildly.
So a patient might have eaten an exquisite meal twenty years ago on their honeymoon and claimed they ate it yesterday simply because they cannot remember.
His surgeon performed medical surgery on him that relieved the pressure in his skull which ultimately saved his life (King Henri II, if he had received a similar procedure, may have survived).
Kean talks about the thalamus and the prefrontal parietal network, the last chapter of this book, the last part of the brain, though not the only one.