Customer Reviews

The Light in the Skull: An Odyssey of Medical Discovery

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I read Glasser's _The Body is the Hero_ many years ago and first had some idea of "modern" immunology, a la 1970 or so. Totally fascinating. This book rambles more (I'm not sure why he did this) but again gives me a new perspective on immunology, viruses, cancer, AIDS, the medical establishment, viral disease, the history of medicine and the evolution of life. I could scarcely put it down, and I wish I had an update, since a book published in 1997 probably represents the status as of 1995 or 1996. He covers the whole range of history of medicine, focussing on Pasteur and after, and also theories and data on the evolution of living system and immmune systems. And has some pretty horrible stories about how the med. establishment and governments have dealt with AIDS, mad cow disease, etc. And left me with hope.

This is a fascinating history of medical discovery. Glasser gives the general reader a deep understanding of disease and the immune system, and the courageous individuals who researched them. I loved this book and look forward to more by Mr. Glasser.

" The Light in the Skull" by Ronald Glasser M.D. ISBN 0-571-19916-X

A waist of time and money.

Having read Dr. Glasser's "365 Days" many years ago I was seduced into buying his more recent work "The Light in the Skull". Unfortunately, this latest work is very disappointing. The first warning is that there is no preface, unusual for a non fiction work. The preface usually tells why the author has undertaken the work and how he intends to approach the task. It would be virtually impossible to write a preface for this book. The book rambles over a vast amount of subject matter concerning the practice of medicine and the history of some of some scientific principles, but lacks a unifying point of view or theme. He even gets some technical facts wrong. He states that Watson and Crick used "chaos theory" during their work on the structure of DNA. In fact, the mathematics of chaos was not developed till several decades after the DNA work. He also, repeatedly, gets the base pairing of DNA wrong. This book needs an editor, proofreader, fact checker and an author that has some idea of what he wants to say.