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Neurologist Harold Klawans died in 1998. He wrote Toscanini’s Fumble
and Newton’s Madness, but his curiosity about how tiny defects in the
brain shape lives turned from the lives of the famous to ordinary people. Each
story in his last book, Defending the Cavewoman: And Other Tales of
Evolutionary Neurology, charts the condition of a patient he treated. These
fascinating tales are detective’s trails leading from individual problems to
causes rooted in evolution. Take a patient who was trying to discover whether
her fits were caused by a brain tumour. They weren’t, but Klawans noticed that
she was left-handed, which was curious because she hailed from a family with
generations of right-handers. Mendelian genetics revealed a pathological cause
for her left-handedness, so Klawans recommended removal of scars—not a
tumour—from her brain. He can’t treat a patient whose painful feet lead to
washboard abs and dinosaur brains. Published by W. W. Norton, £15.95, ISBN
0393048314.