The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, also known by its full title The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of The Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery is a science book regarding the brain and its functions by Sam Kean. The Daily Telegraph described it as "A dramatic account of the gruesome accidents that shaped modern neuroscience."
Publication The book was published in hardback on May 6, 2014 by Little, Brown and Company.
Contents/Synopsis 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. His writing shows that every breakthrough was borne of malady, injury, necessity.
Part I: Gross Anatomy
Introduction Each chapter begins with a rebus, a word puzzle, pertaining to the subject of the chapter. In this introductory section, Kean essentially provides some background information and summarizes how the book will continue.
Chapter 1: The Dueling Neurosurgeons 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). It is during this second joust that Henri was whacked square in the face by his opponent's jousting pole. This is when Kean introduces the "dueling neurosurgeons": Ambroise Paré and Andreas Vesalius, both esteemed neurosurgeons at the time. Paré was the royal surgeon at the time and was a pioneer in terms of medicine, as he refused to heed medical norms at the time due to the fact that they were often painful and useless for the patient. 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. They both teamed together when the king fell to try to see if they could revive him. Upon examination, the king had no fractures to his head and so it would have been assumed that nothing was wrong. The surgeons knew better, and were going to encounter the first concussion of that time. After the king's death, they found that his brain was in awful shape, "yellowed and putrefied" and found "pools of blackened fluid beneath the meninges". 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.
Part II: Cells, Senses, Circuits
Chapter 2: The Assassin's Soup This chapter begins with a troubled man: Charles Guiteau. He had apparently heard God speak to him, saying that he should assassinate the president at the time: James Garfield. 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. After much planning, he shot Garfield in the lower back, not killing him right away, but being the ultimate cause of his death (Guiteau claimed that doctors killed Garfield, he had just shot him). Guiteau's lawyer (who was, subsequently, his brother) George Scoville, pled insanity. Though, after many tests with various court-appointed psychologists/psychiatrists, he was declared sane because he could differentiate between right and wrong. During the trial, a neurosurgeon Edward Charles Spitzka pointed out that there was more than likely underlying trouble in Guiteau's mind. After the trial concluded and Guiteau passed, an autopsy of his brain was conducted. By this time, autopsy had evolved into a microscopic art, and so Spitzka took to the microscope with samples of Guiteau's brain. Of course, Spitzka found holes in his gray matter and extensive damage to the tissue that "nourished neurons". Later, it was declared that Guiteau was more than likely a schizophrenic. During this time, another scientist, Camillo Golgi, was brewing up reticulum theory. He had spilled silver solution on brain samples and then looked at them under a microscope. What he saw stunned him: neurons. He noticed they had three parts: the cell body, axon, and dendrites, and he was the first to see them in such detail. He could determine no space between the neurons and emerged a supporter of reticulum theory. Another scientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, was enamored by the pictures of neurons that Golgi produced. Despite his fascination with the drawings, though, he disagreed with reticulum theory. He noticed that, under a microscope, gray matter neurons were not fused together. The story of another assassin follows: Leon Czolgosz. 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. He proceeded to shoot McKinley in the stomach and pancreas and was then sentenced to the electric chair. McKinley died of infection after eating when his stomach had not fully healed. Much to the anger of various neuroscientists and neurosurgeons alike, Czolgosz's brain was confiscated from study and destroyed. The experiments of Otto Loewi are also mentioned. His experiment was one in which he placed two frog hearts in separate cups of saline. He sped one heart up by triggering nerves, then transferred the saline of the fast heart into the saline of the normal beating heart, resulting in the normal heart being as fast as the other heart that he had triggered. This proved that neurons did not just use electricity, but also used chemicals. But since he realized that electricity could not jump the (tiny) distance between dendrites, he concluded that the electricity transformed into transferable chemicals.
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