Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside

#107
Title: Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside
Author: Katrina Firlik
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2006
Genre: Medical, memoir, education
273 pages

A well-written and easy to follow account of Firlik's training as a neurosurgeon (she was the first woman admitted to her neurosurgery residency). The narrative is more of a gloss plus clinical highlights than a more in-depth account lof her training; it is not especially psychological, though she does highlight the developmental turning points associated with the residency. There is some material, but not much, about the relationships between surgeons (either specific people or categorical groups), but a reasonable amount about what working with different patients has meant to her. Firlik tells a good neurology tale, and I would have liked more of them. Read with Working in a Very Small Place: The Making of a Neurosurgeon for another neurosurgery narrative, with Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science for another general surgical training narrative, and with The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing and Forged by the Knife: The Experience of Surgical Residency from the Perspective of a Woman of Color for women surgeons' accounts with the added aspect of culture and ethnicity.