Inside The Brain David Noonan

Inside the Brain, written by David Noonan, was a vivid and often jarring bird’s eye view into the world of neurosurgery. Mr. Noonan, begins his essay with the patient already under anesthesia laying on the table while the medical staff are moving around him in a symphony of route routines. Noonan then proceeds to guide us through the nitty gritty of brain surgery like a Chilton's manual. He escorts the reader through this mysterious medical world that most of us are largely unfamiliar with to its fruition with the adept precision one would expect from, well, a neurosurgeon. As I began reading Noonan’s essay, I was struck by the immediate sense of vulnerability I felt. This was largely due the depiction of the patient as almost a hapless victim, lying clueless, indifferent to what was about to happen to him. This is further shored up with the technical and detached way that the surgeons treat the patient before them, which they have thoughtfully bestowed with the moniker, “a textbook beauty.” On the other hand, as I progressed through the essay, the sophisticated lexicon and confidence of the doctors starts to erode my concerns and I start to feel like our unnamed man might just …show more content…
After reading Noonan’s essay I think to some degree it is true, but whether or not that matters in the end I’m not sure. If I'm on the table do I care whether or not the surgeon knows my middle name or what my favorite color is? No, I want him to be the best surgeon in the world and save my life. As we learned at the end of the New Yorker profile, Soup, “He’s downright rude...even abusive. But you can’t deny it, his soup is the best.” And so it goes with surgeons, his hands are the best, and in the end that's all that