Neurology Rounds with the Maverick

Adventures with Patients from the Golden Age of Medicine

By: Bernard Patten

Narrated by: Gregory V. Diehl

Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's Summary

In Neurology Rounds with the Maverick, clinical neurologist Dr. Bernard M. Patten recounts his most profound, entertaining, and uncommon experiences with patients throughout his 34-year medical career.

Learn about the strange case of the teenage girl who got pulled out of class for medical treatment because she couldn’t stop laughing. Then consider the 14-year-old who faked grand mal seizures for more than a year as to get away from her sexually abusive father.

Consider the awkward situation of the hairdresser who heard voices from God instructing her to stab her customers with her scissors or the well-documented phenomenon of patients (including Dr. Patten’s own mother) correctly predicting their own deaths.

Listen to Dr. Patten’s encounters with artist George Rodrigue as he lost his memory and physicist Stephen Hawking when he was considering experimental ALS treatment. As well, enjoy learning about when Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich came to America to be treated for atrophy in his right hand and shipping magnate Aristotle Socrates Onassis’s consultations about Myasthenia Gravis.

Neurology Rounds with the Maverick presents an authentic look inside some of the most complex, strange, and fascinating neurological cases of the last half-century of medicine. Listen it to appreciate the good, the bad, the terrible, and the densely human anecdotes that document the past and light the way for the future of medicine.

©2019 Bernard M. Patten (P)2019 Bernard M. Patten

Interesting listen, badly marred by poor narration

This is a stream of consciousness sort of autobiography of the life in medicine of a gifted neurologist, who happens, like many physicians in his age, to think physicians are gods, and should be treated as such. It's highly opinionated, sometime decidedly incorrect, alternately brutally honest about this god's failures, and self-aggrandizing about his successes. One doesn't get the sense they'd probably love Bernard Patten, but one might well love his company in measured doses. Raconteurs have an eternal appeal, and learned ones doubly so.

Unfortunately, the book is read by a boob who couldn't be bothered to learn to pronounce the vocabulary in the book - which is often medicial - and can hardly get through a paragraph without mauling some term. Often I had to stop and think hard to figure out what he was even talking about, so far from standard pronunciation was the narrator. In other cases it was, just, wrong - repeatedly reading "nephrosis" as enphrosis, e.g. In addition, the reader put a smart-alec lilt in much of his reading that, had he a voice suited to a narrative by a retired writer might have added to the narration, but which in this narrators case, combined with the butchery of the language made it sound like a teenager smart-mouthing something about which he was utterly ignorant.

Inconsisten at best partnered with poor narration

I found this book after finishing “When The Air Hits Your Brain”, Another memoir by a neurologist. I enjoyed that book very much. This one was hit or miss.

First off, worst choice for narrator ever! This book is written by an older gentleman but the narrator in obviously young. There was just a disconnect there. Also, as others have mentioned, this narrator mispronounced fairly well known medical terms.

As far as the story itself, I did have many enjoyable moments. I would say a 60/40 split of enjoying (the 60 part) and not enjoying (the 40 part). There would be very interesting stories and fascinating accounts of how the body works that were put in terms that any lay person could follow. It would be followed by long, droning parts filled with intricate medical jargon that seemed irrelevant to the overall story. I enjoy medicalese but some of this totally interrupted and disconnected the overall theme or story.

I’m not disappointed that I read this book but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. I do think I would enjoy knowing this doctor in real life as some of our beliefs and politics aligned. This book, however, could have been more concise which would have made it more enjoyable.

I loved this book!

I found this book so incredibly interesting. I’ve never read/listened to anything like this before and I really liked it. I am an RN but I think non-medical people would love this book as well!