This did live up to its cover: it is about how a doctor’s life is changed by various patients of his. However, I personally prefer medical memoirs that focus more on the discipline or on the patients, so this wasn’t my favourite. I was also more sensitive than usual for some reason to the neurosurgery descriptions. They are matter-of-fact but possibly nausea-inducing if you don’t like to hear about sharp implements cutting into people’s skulls or brains. ( )

Canadian neurosurgeon Dr. Christopher Honey has written an informative and richly detailed book, focusing on seven patients who changed him professionally and personally. Along the way, he provides

• a brief history of neurosurgery, highlighting some of the important, ground-breaking figures in the field (Harvey Cushing and Wilder Penfield, for example);
• descriptions of some important tools of his surgical trade and explanations about how they are used;
• a sense of the way a brain surgery typically unfolds—in the first world and in the third;
• the critical importance of a well-functioning, focused surgical team;
• insights into the challenges of working within the encumbered, bureaucratic, and often glacially slow Canadian medical system;
and
• accessible discussions of several conditions he’s treated in his career—from hydrocephalus in young children (where cerebrospinal fluid flow is obstructed in the brain and patients’ heads become dangerously enlarged) to vascular compression syndromes in the brain (where small cerebral arteries pulse against important nerves, altering the function of those nerves or making them hyper-irritable so that they cause frightening, mysterious, and debilitating symptoms in patients).

Honey’s book is a challenging one. Descriptions of surgeries often had me googling anatomical diagrams in order to understand the problems the neurosurgeon was attempting to correct. I think a few strategically placed diagrams would have been helpful.

The author’s writing is clear, logical, and well organized. Honey is brave and honest about some cases in which his patients had difficult recoveries. In general, his tone is (perhaps not surprisingly) more cool and cerebral than warm and emotional. Although I felt I did get to know and trust him, I had the sense that he was holding back at times. In short, I don’t think he fully delivered on the deeper ways in which he changed as a doctor and a human being because of his interactions with the seven highlighted patients. Honey remains a practising, professionally active neurosurgeon at a large Vancouver hospital, and I suspect this fact has some bearing on a certain aloofness to the writing.

This is a valuable, informative book for motivated nonfiction readers who are interested in the human body and brain and the medical profession in general. ( )