We humans are exceptional at self-deceit. This isn’t terribly surprising if you brave the neuroscientific literature about how we think. But before we are mired in academic mud trying to get purchase on our psychological frailties, let’s talk Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh is the stuff of legend. Something in the heady mix of tortured…

When we left our troubled Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard at the end of the previous column, he was busy gaining eponymous fame for his description of spinal cord hemi-section. What’s that, you say? There was no mention of trouble last time? Well, it appears we’ve only heard half of the Brown-Séquard story. His is also the…

Palm tree fringed islands have long been destinations for escapist travel. The hero of today’s column was born on one such idyllic atoll, and he returned there several times during his capricious existence, usually when the challenges of life became too overwhelming. Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard was born, in 1817, on Mauritius, an island secreted away…

You can’t work in Emergency Medicine without being regularly awestruck by the human body. The way it functions, on both macroscopic and molecular levels, is so improbably complex it’s hard for us to get our top-heavy brains around it. And, quite frankly, we haven’t. We are unearthing new physiological principles all the time. Some recently…