Injured Brains of Medical Minds. Views from Within

Ed Narinder Kapur Oxford University Press, £27, pp 421 ISBN 0 19 852144

“You would certainly make very clever doctors of men who from their earliest years, besides acquiring scientific knowledge, had come in contact with very many cases, and who had themselves suffered from every malady, and were not constitutionally very healthy.” Thus said Plato, and thus begins Narinder Kapur's odyssey through the disordered brain states of medical doctors and scientists who have suffered cerebral pathology. A variety of patients, anonymous and named, describe what it is like to be “on the other side.”

These papers are gathered from over the past century, with the emphasis being on more recent times. The opportunistic, sporadic occurrence …