Renowned neurologist Dr. Allan H. Ropper and author Brian David Burrell will be at the Harvard Book Store for a discussion of their book “Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease.”
BOOK SIGNING DETAILS
12/01/14 7:00 PM
Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone:(617) 661-1515
About the Author
Dr. Allan H. Ropper has been a practicing and academic neurologist for 35 years and is currently Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and the Raymond D. Adams Distinguished Clinician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is credited with being one of the founders of the field of neurological intensive care and is author of the most widely used textbook of neurology in the world, Principles of Neurology, now in its tenth edition, in addition to numerous books and over 150 scholarly articles. His research interests are in the intensive care of head trauma, stroke, Guillain-Barré syndrome and in experimental gene therapy for neuropathy. Ropper is publicly known as the physician who has treated Michael J. Fox, Ozzy Osbourne and other personalities. He has advised the US Department of Defense Health Board and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican. Ropper currently serves as an Associate Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. He has been elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London), the American Academy of Neurology, and the American College of Physicians.
Brian Burrell is a senior lecturer in mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has taught for the last 25 years. Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole is his first co-authored work. His other books include Postcards from the Brain Museum, The Words We Live By, and Merriam-Webster’s Guide to Everyday Math. He has appeared on the Today Showwith Katie Couric, Booknotes with Brian Lamb, and NPR’s Morning Edition with Steve Inskeep. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
About the Book
“Tell the doctor where it hurts.” It sounds simple enough, unless the problem affects the very organ that produces awareness and generates speech. What is it like to try to heal the body when the mind is under attack? In this book, Dr. Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell take the reader behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School’s neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre, life-altering afflictions. Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Ropper inhabits a world where absurdities abound:• A figure skater whose body has become a ticking time-bomb
• A salesman who drives around and around a traffic rotary, unable to get off
• A college quarterback who can’t stop calling the same play
• A child molester who, after falling on the ice, is left with a brain that is very much dead inside a body that is very much alive
• A mother of two young girls, diagnosed with ALS, who has to decide whether a life locked inside her own head is worth livingHow does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr. Ropper and his colleague answer these questions by taking the reader into a rarified world where lives and minds hang in the balance.
