And throughout it all, she'd had to endure the rivalry of her cousin Diane. She'd then endured a decade of barrenness with Henri before saving her life by squeezing out two heirs. As a fourteen-year-old in 1533, she'd watched helplessly as her family, the Medici of Florence, negotiated her marriage to an unpromising prince of France.
Queen Catherine looked like royalty itself in a gown of silk interwoven with gold fibers, but she'd actually grown up an orphan. The unlikely king, unlikely queen, and unlikely royal mistress were celebrating a supposed end to violence that day. And over the next eleven days, until King Henri was past danger, most of the great themes of the next four centuries of neuroscience would play themselves out in the microcosm of his brain. But even these men had never worked on a case so important. Just a handful of doctors in the world in 1559 could have foreseen the damage already diffusing through his skull. As soon as he was clobbered, everything dimmed. In his last split second of normal life, Henri's eyes might have registered a glimpse of the scene in front of him - the glint of sand kicked up by his horse's hooves the throbbing white ribbons wrapped around his lance the glare off the armor of his charging opponent. But when the visor was wrenched open, the sunlight punched his eyes, a slap as sharp as a hostage would feel the moment the bag was torn off his head. During the charge, little light penetrated the cocoon of his helmet. This article was originally published with the title "The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons" in Scientific American 310, 5, 76 (May 2014)ĭoi:10.The world would have looked stunningly, alarmingly bright to the king of France, then suddenly dark. Destroy another node and they lose the ability to read-even though they can still write.” Beyond paying tribute to the scientific advances these patients made possible, Kean humanizes the patients themselves. In this compilation of patients' stories, he details some of the unexpected truths revealed by accidents: “Destroy one small node of neurons, and people lose the ability to recognize fruits and vegetables, but not other food.
“Despite the (often overhyped) advances of fMRI and other brain-scanning technologies, injuries remain the best, and only, way to infer certain things about the brain,” writes journalist Kean.
Some people's tragedies have been science's miracles, particularly in the field of neuroscience, where researchers have long relied on rare brain traumas to reveal the workings of the mind. The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery
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