The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons

by Sam Kean

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  Chapter Nine: “Sleights of Mind”

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  Chapter Ten: Honest Lying

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  Chapter Eleven: Left, Right, and Center

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  Chapter Twelve: The Man, the Myth, the Legend

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  Notes and Miscellanea

  Chapter One: The Dueling Neurosurgeons

  1. whether this satisfied her: Welcome to the endnotes! Whenever you see an asterisk (*) in the text, you can flip back here to find bonus material about the topic at hand, or explanations to clarify a point. If you want to flip back immediately for each note, go for it; or if you prefer, you can read all the notes at once after each chapter, like an afterword or epilogue. But do flip back: I promise plenty of exotic facts and salacious gossip. To wit:

  However creepy it sounds for a duke to caress the leg of a naked fourteen-year-old princess, it sure beats the wedding night of the girl’s mother, Queen Catherine. After arriving in Paris at the same age, Catherine had to consummate her marriage to Henri under the watchful eye of her new father-in-law, King François, who took a seat in the corner. François reported to advisors the next day that Henri and Catherine “both showed valor in the joust.”

  Realism taken a little too far. a windowpane reflected in the unbroken amniotic sac around a fetus.

  a fly prepares to snack on a dissected corpse.

  2. marriages of art and science: After Vesalius, it became fashionable to make the drawings in anatomy textbooks as realistic as possible, to the point of absurdity. To show how faithfully they were copying every detail before their eyes, some artists included the flies snacking on the cadaver’s entrails, and one man sketched the windowpane that he saw reflected on the amniotic sac surrounding a fetus (see illustrations on previous page). A few gentlemen even bound copies of Fabrica and other anatomy books in human skin.

  3. antipodal to the blow: We don’t quite know, even today, why Henri’s brain suffered only a contrecoup injury. Modern studies show that the sudden acceleration of the brain—usually the result of a moving object striking the head—more often causes damage on the same side as the blow. (These are known as coup injuries.) In contrast, deceleration of the brain—the result of a moving head striking something immobile—usually causes contrecoup injuries, damage on the opposite side. But these are not hard-and-fast rules: a brain can suffer either coup or contrecoup injuries in either case—or even both, as it bounces back and forth inside the skull. Regardless, the physics of Henri’s case was complicated by the fact that his head was already in motion when a moving object (the lance butt) struck it.