Newswise — AMHERST, Mass. – A new book co-authored by a distinguished Boston neurologist and a University of Massachusetts Amherst mathematician takes readers behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School’s neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre neurological defects and life-altering disorders including Parkinson’s disease and ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
In Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease (St. Martin’s Press, Sept. 30), Harvard Medical School neurologist Dr. Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell, senior lecturer of mathematics and statistics at UMass Amherst and author of six books, including 2005’s Postcards from the Brain Museum, share real-life stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations including:
• A former figure skater whose body has inexplicably become a ticking time-bomb
• A salesman who drives around and around a traffic rotary, unable to pull off
• A college quarterback who can’t stop calling the same play
• A mother of two young girls, diagnosed with ALS, who has to decide whether her life is still worth living
Ropper and Burrell look into a peculiar world where minds and lives hang in the balance, giving readers a sense of how the neurologically-impaired live and feel. A fascinating adventure into the human brain, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole examines how one begins to treat such complicated, opaque cases, deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease and counsel those whose lives may be changed forever.
More information about the book, including an excerpt, can be found at http://us.macmillan.com/reachingdowntherabbithole.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dr. Allan H. Ropper is a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Raymond D. Adams Master Clinician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is credited with founding the field of neurological intensive care and counts Michael J. Fox among his patients.
Brian David Burrell teaches mathematics and statistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The author of Postcards from the Brain Museum, he has appeared on the Today Show, C-SPAN’s Booknotes, and NPR’s Morning Edition.
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