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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…