Madness and Memory

Madness and Memory PDF Author: Stanley B. Prusiner
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300191146
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The author, a 1997 recipient of the Noble Prize in medicine, describes the years he spent researching and demonstrating how the infectious proteins known as prions were responsible for brain diseases and how his theory has now become widely accepted in the science establishment.

Madness and Memory

Madness and Memory PDF Author: Stanley B. Prusiner
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300191146
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The author, a 1997 recipient of the Noble Prize in medicine, describes the years he spent researching and demonstrating how the infectious proteins known as prions were responsible for brain diseases and how his theory has now become widely accepted in the science establishment.

Patient H.M.

Patient H.M. PDF Author: Luke Dittrich
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 067964380X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
“Oliver Sacks meets Stephen King”* in this propulsive, haunting journey into the life of the most studied human research subject of all time, the amnesic known as Patient H.M. For readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks comes a story that has much to teach us about our relentless pursuit of knowledge. Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award • Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • New York Post • NPR • The Economist • New York • Wired • Kirkus Reviews • BookPage In 1953, a twenty-seven-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison—who suffered from severe epilepsy—received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next sixty years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today. Patient H.M. is, at times, a deeply personal journey. Dittrich’s grandfather was the brilliant, morally complex surgeon who operated on Molaison—and thousands of other patients. The author’s investigation into the dark roots of modern memory science ultimately forces him to confront unsettling secrets in his own family history, and to reveal the tragedy that fueled his grandfather’s relentless experimentation—experimentation that would revolutionize our understanding of ourselves. Dittrich uses the case of Patient H.M. as a starting point for a kaleidoscopic journey, one that moves from the first recorded brain surgeries in ancient Egypt to the cutting-edge laboratories of MIT. He takes readers inside the old asylums and operating theaters where psychosurgeons, as they called themselves, conducted their human experiments, and behind the scenes of a bitter custody battle over the ownership of the most important brain in the world. Patient H.M. combines the best of biography, memoir, and science journalism to create a haunting, endlessly fascinating story, one that reveals the wondrous and devastating things that can happen when hubris, ambition, and human imperfection collide. “An exciting, artful blend of family and medical history.”—The New York Times *Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Brain on Fire

Brain on Fire PDF Author: Susannah Cahalan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451621396
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING CHLOË GRACE MORETZ A “captivating” (The New York Times Book Review), award-winning memoir and instant New York Times bestseller that goes far beyond its riveting medical mystery, Brain on Fire is a powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity. When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled as violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened? In an “unforgettable” (Elle), “stunningly brave” (NPR), and breathtaking narrative, Susannah tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that almost didn’t happen. “A fascinating look at the disease that…could have cost this vibrant, vital young woman her life” (People), Brain on Fire is an unforgettable exploration of memory and identity, faith and love, and a profoundly compelling tale of survival and perseverance.

History Lessons

History Lessons PDF Author: Clifton Crais
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
ISBN: 9781468310177
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An acclaimed scholar tackles his greatest historical puzzle yet--his own abused past and tortured memory

The Memory Palace

The Memory Palace PDF Author: Mira Bartok
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439183325
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
A gorgeous memoir about the 17 year estrangement of the author and her homeless schizophrenic mother, and their reunion.

Deadly Feasts

Deadly Feasts PDF Author: Richard Rhodes
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471104575
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In this brilliant and gripping medical detective story. Richard Rhodes follows virus hunters on three continents as they track the emergence of a deadly new brain disease that first kills cannibals in New Guinea, then cattle and young people in Britain and France -- and that has already been traced to food animals in the United States. In a new Afterword for the paperback, Rhodes reports the latest U.S. and worldwide developments of a burgeoning global threat.

Madness in Its Place

Madness in Its Place PDF Author: Diana Gittins
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415167868
Category : Colchester (England)
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This book provides an unusual and very accessible account of trends and changes in the history of psychiatry during the 20th century, while offering a lively narrative of the daily lives of those who worked and lived in a typical psychiatric hospital

The Book of Memory

The Book of Memory PDF Author: Petina Gappah
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374714886
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The story that you have asked me to tell you does not begin with the pitiful ugliness of Lloyd’s death. It begins on a long-ago day in August when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man. Memory, the narrator of Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory, is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, after being sentenced for murder. As part of her appeal, her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. The death penalty is a mandatory sentence for murder, and Memory is, both literally and metaphorically, writing for her life. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers? Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between past and present, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award–winning writer Petina Gappah weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate, and the treachery of memory.

Reef Madness

Reef Madness PDF Author: David Dobbs
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307490076
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Explores the century-long controversy over the orgins of coral reefs, a debate that split the world of nineteenth-century science, looking at the diverse roles of Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, and Charles Darwin and reflecting on how the search for the truth shed new light on the formation of Earth and its natural wonders.

Fatal Protein

Fatal Protein PDF Author: Rosalind M. Ridley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book presents a clear and authoritative account of the prion diseases for the non-specialist. It deals with the history of scrapie in sheep, the spread of kuru through cannibalism in Papua New Guinea, BSE, which has killed 170,000 cattle in the UK, and the question of whether the newvariant form of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD) results from eating BSE-infected meat. All aspects of the diseases are covered, including genetics, clinical aspects, laboratory research, epidemiology, and field studies. Accessibly written by authors who are leading researchers in the field, it is thefirst book to provide a scientifically accurate yet readable account of these topical diseases.