'Doctor Olaf Van Schuler's Brain' is a fascinating, glorious reading experience that will have you questioning everything around you long after you've finished the book. It is the perfect cure for certainty.
When you look at a book as complicated, as enjoyable as wonderfully layered as 'Doctor Olaf Van Schuler's Brain' by Kirsten Menger-Anderson, music comes to mind... But what’s really wonderful about this book is just how much she packs into her linked short stories; great characters, echoing themes, parallel lives, and so much more. This is a book that will suit a wide variety of readers, from the McSweeney's and art-house literary gang to the science-fiction loving readers of this column. And though it has so much in it, it does feel just like the symphony you suspect it is as you read, a beautiful melodic sweep though medical — and human — history.
Dr. Olaf Van Schuler’s Brain is an intriguing string of 13 stories...there are tasty treats aplenty in this book.
I heard from one of my bookseller friends...'have you read Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain, because if you haven't, let me know and I'm going to send you a copy.' And for a bookseller to offer to send me a book always means that I have to drop everything and read it because it's just that good... I absolutely loved it.
Menger-Anderson’s descriptions of the evolution of surgical practice and its consequences make these stories truly unforgettable. I normally don’t get excited about scientific writing, fiction or nonfiction, but in these tales, the surgeries are surrounded with an aura of mystery and magic that’s absent from modern medicine, and the characters that inhabit the stories are so elegantly written that the stories become more about the doctors’ obsessions with understanding the workings of the body than their literal blood and guts.
In 1871 [coincidentally, the year in which "Neurasthenia: A Victorian Love Story" is set]...the U.S. commissioner of education published a report by Edward Jarvis on the "Relation of Education to Insanity." Jarvis had studied 1,741 cases of insanity and concluded that "over-study" was responsible for 205 of them. "Education lays the foundation of a large portion of the causes of mental disorder," Jarvis wrote.
