Life, death, and in between

by Harold L. Klawans

How do doctors piece together obscure medical clues to make a diagnosis? What happens when the decisions are a matter of life and death? In these twenty-six gripping tales culled from his three decades in medicine, the eminent neurologist Harold Klawans, "the shrewdest medical super-sleuth writing today" (The [London] Sunday Times), reaches to the heart of modern medicine. Here the author of the highly acclaimed Toscanini's Fumble and Newton's Madness recounts how as a terrified resident he once confused the smell of his own nervous sweat with the odor of the patient - which turns out to be the essential clue in the diagnosis. We meet the "Lone Ranger" who becomes a mummy after he's given an experimental drug for schizophrenia; the vice president of a bank who believes that snake venom will cure his Lou Gehrig's disease; a man whose eyes, even while driving, suddenly, spontaneously, close; and an eminent neurologist from Vienna whom Klawans exposes as having been a member of the SS. On