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Brainstorm: Detective Stories From the World of Neurology

Suzanne O'Sullivan

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Jun 12, 2021 Petra X rated it it was amazing

Shelves: psycho-neurology-crime, 2021-100-reviews, 2021-read, reviewed, getting-a-bit-personal-here

This book is about epilepsy, the title doesn't really relate to the content! But maybe if it had been entitled "Epilepsy" I wouldn't have read it and then I would have missed out on a fascinating and informative book. There are 12 chapters, each one about a different type of epilepsy and detailed through the story of a patient. This doesn't sound fascinating, but it absolutely is. I had read It's All in Your Head by Suzanne O'Sullivan before and that was a 5 star but I'd forgotten about it and t This book is about epilepsy, the title doesn't really relate to the content! But maybe if it had been entitled "Epilepsy" I wouldn't have read it and then I would have missed out on a fascinating and informative book. There are 12 chapters, each one about a different type of epilepsy and detailed through the story of a patient. This doesn't sound fascinating, but it absolutely is. I had read It's All in Your Head by Suzanne O'Sullivan before and that was a 5 star but I'd forgotten about it and thought she was a new author to me.

The author has a gift for writing of the patients as individuals who suffer from their disorder and who are complicit in the detective work of sorting out exactly what has gone wrong in their brains; they are in this together! This very human and warm style of writing reminds me of two other neurologists who were gifted authors, Oliver Sacks and Harold Klawans.

The author didn't shy away from writing of failures, where medical science couldn't restore a lawyer to his former high-powered self or even to his past personality, after a mugging assault and consequent brain damage. And most tragically, where a lovely young woman's seizures - brief seconds of no muscle tone - meant she needed to be observed all the time, one second of a carer looking away meant falling face forward into a bowl of soup, into the sea to nearly drown, onto the floor with her up to 500 one-second seizures a day and no treatment ever helping.

Grand mal, a personal experience, or viewing at least. (view spoiler)

Petit mal, my friend's strange absences (view spoiler)

The book made me think of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot who also suffers from epilepsy, the kind that is a religious experience, at least in my interpretation of the book. I don't think I've read any other books where epilepsy features.

So until I read the book, that was my limited exposure to epilepsy and I didn't know there were so many different variations of this disorder, not just the 12 detailed but also others briefly described. These included seizures brought on by certain kinds of music, food, and even thoughts.

All in all a very well written and interesting book made more special and enjoyable than most neurology ones because the patients were so well-described they were easy to identify with as people we might know. Recommended to people who like these pop-science books I read. ...more

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