BRAIN SURGEON’S STORY

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27035, 9 May 1953, Page 3

BRAIN SURGEON’S STORY

Brain Surgeon. An autobiography. By William Sharpe. With a foreword by Sir Cecil Wakeley, Bt, President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Gollancz. 244 pp.

This outspoken and entertaining book is written by an eminent American brain-surgeon, 'one of the pioneers in neurological surgery, and a specialist in spastic paralysis. Trained in cerebral surgery under the famous and hot-tempered Dr. Harvey Cushing at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, William Sharpe first established his own reputation at the Harvard Medical School in China when neurosurgery was still in its infancy. A doctor with the highest professional standards, Dr. Sharpe is uncompromising and unusually candid in his accounts of the mistakes frequently made by doctors, and constantly expresses his opinion that autopsies should be more ’frequently performed “to keep doctors humble.” Another constant theme of his discussions is that spinal tests should be taken on all newborn babies. This rises from the discovery that his own particular contribution to medical knowledge—namely, that cerebral palsy' can be cured by relieving intracranial pressure. and that this pressure is usually the result of a hemorrhage at birth which cannot be remarked without a diagnostic spinal puncture. Aside from his richly varied and rewarding professional experiences Dr. Sharpe’s book is full of immensely readable anecdotes about his family, travels, student-life and patients. Typical of his own robust sense of humour and the genial and civilised tone of his whole book is the story of the autopsy which circumstances forced him to perform, with considerable reluctance, on his own brother. His brother, also a doctor, had died of a painful and long-drawn-out illness which nobody could understand and had insisted that an autopsy should be done; William Sharpe, working in haste with the funeral service to begin in a few hours, discovered that the cause of death had been an extreme degree of arteriosclerosis caused by absorption of toxins from the teeth. "As I sutured together the median incision,” he says, “I suddenly remembered Norman’s remark: Td like to know what this damp thing is.’ I found some writing paper and pencil—no ink was available—and wrote the following note, which I placed within the chest wall: ‘Dear Norman, it was your goddamned teeth! You should have had them out years ago! Love. Clyde.’”