Book Review: When the Air Hits Your Brain

When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery by Frank T. Vertosick Jr.


This memoir of a neurosurgeon’s career is a combination of “how I became a doctor” and anecdotes of memorable patients. It starts out a little slow, since “how I became a doctor” doesn’t really thrill me as much as stories of cutting into people’s skulls to take bad bits out, but it picks up.

Readers who have a higher than average understanding of neurology will probably get more out of this book, and any doctor who wants a comparison of the “back in my day, this is how we did things” might find the memoir aspect of it fascinating. I’ve never been to medical school and I am only iffy about the brain, so mostly I just liked the mystery and drama of “what’s wrong with this guy?” and “is the baby going to die?”

People do die in this book; it’s not like a movie where you only die if you’re a supporting character. The author talks about how that affected him as a person. If you want to be a surgeon, you need to be a bit of a psychopath. Once you let the deaths affect you, you lose your effectiveness. It’s not something I thought about a lot before.