Another Day in the Frontal Lobe

Pretty good book. Interesting for the most part, but disturbing at times when she seems to go a lot further in her value judgments than a doctor should (“should we really spend money on keeping this person alive?”), as if it was a surgeon's job to define the economical balance between insurers and the insured.

Still, it was an enlightening read about what can and can't be done with brain surgery, what's hard about it, and so on. Recommended!

Medical memoirs are my version of brain candy and being weeks away from earning my own M.D. from Dr. Firlik's alma mater, I thought this would be an apropos read. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm part of Dr. Firlik's intended audience. Granted most medical memoirs are written for the layperson, but being some what of a connoisseur of the genre, I can tell you that some are more interesting to those of us who have done are own time in the neurosurgical OR and some of them are less so.

All of this is not to say that I didn't find Dr. Firlik's book entertaining. It certainly was, and in particular Dr. Firlik has inherited a gift of storytelling – her patient encounters are touching, detailed and never judgmental. This is clearly the strong point of the book.

The weaker parts of the book are that, while she is clearly trying to be, Dr. Firlik herself admits that she is no Dr. Sacks. She alludes to him frequently, but just as frequently apologizes for the lack of deep thought on the brain/mind dichotomy that she is interested in, explaining that as a neurosurgeon, her first commitment is to the operating room. Her honesty is appreciated, and at points it seems that she is doing herself a disservice, for she is a very introspective person. But at the end of the day, she's correct – she sees interesting questions that arise from her profession, but has not explored them in depth. At no point is this more clear than the very weak closing two chapters, particularly the last chapter regarding the future of neurosurgery.

This chapter is rushed and wandering. It contains too many ideas for one chapter, ranging from neuro-enhancements to minimally invasive surgeries to a discussion of turf-wars that may, in fact, be too entrenched in medical politics to be comprehensible to the lay audience. Dr. Firlik should play to her strengths – the ability to recount the daily life of a neurosurgeon and leave further exploration of the questions she raises on consciousness, the mind and neurological enhancements to the reader.

Ultimate difficult job? Brain surgeon, right? Turns out it's not that hard...at least it doesn't seem all that hard according to Katrina Firlik in her memoir, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe. She's got some stories to tell. I won't give anything away, but you won't forget the man with the infection that moved from his face into his brain.