About this item
Why do we think of mental illness as a brain disease? Is there a difference between a sick mind and a sick brain? How the Brain Lost Its Mind, written by a prominent neurologist and a student of medical history, traces the origins of our ideas about insanity and the collision course that simply reduces the mind to the connections between nerve cells. Starting with syphilis of the brain, the disease that made insanity a medical problem and started the field of psychiatry, the authors study a host of famous and infamous characters--among them van Gogh, the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, Guy de Maupassant, and Al Capone.How the Brain Lost Its Mind explains how we have twisted ourselves into the medicalization of every minor mood and thought, each with a pill to cure the psychopathology of ordinary daily life.
About the Author
Dr. Ropper is a Professor of Neurology at Harvard and Executive Vice Chair of Neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He is an Associate Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and serves on numerous medical journal editorial boards. Dr. Ropper is credited with being one of the founders of the field of Neurological intensive care. He has over 180 professional publications on varied subjects in neurology and is sought after as a speaker at medical and medical-social events. He has served as an advisor to the Vatican through the Pontifical Scientific Council and was a member of the Defense Health Board of DOD.His latest book, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole - is a collaboration with Brian Burrell, in which the two authors describe their bizarre and poignant encounters with patients who are dealing with brain and nervous system disorders at a major teaching hospital.
