This is a terrific book. Highly recommended. Like [Oliver] Sacks, Honey is interested in the lived human experience of those who suffer from brain disorders, in the heroic resilience of his patients and in the often quirky and always interesting characters of his fellow healers. The author’s regard for human complexity and heroism is closer to Tolstoy than to technocrat, and the reader is left with a fully rounded sense of each of the patients Honey calls his “magnificent seven.”

There is a long history of doctors who write, often beautifully, about the thin veil between life and death. Chris Honey, one of the most prominent neurosurgeons in Canada, joins them with The Tenth Nerve (Random House Canada), his reflections on seven patients who left their mark on him. One was Emily, the first patient in the world to be diagnosed and surgically cured of hemi-laryngopharyngeal spasm (HELPS syndrome), a choking affliction involving her vagus nerve, the tenth cranial nerve. Honey made that diagnosis and achieved that cure, but neither would have been possible - as he notes in his riveting account of the 2015 operation in Vancouver General Hospital - without Emily's courageous persistence.

Chris Honey shows us more than the neurosurgeon’s hidden world — the chaos of the emergency, the ache of the hopeless patient, the subtly pulsing moonscape of the brain under an operating microscope. His is a heartfelt and informed story about crafting a working wisdom, an acumen, about his patients, his profession and, ultimately, himself.

In this revealing memoir, Chris Honey weaves impressive surgical knowledge and thrilling medical history together with real patient cases, allowing the reader to bear witness to a modern-day medical breakthrough. Beautifully written and accessible to all, The Tenth Nerve features the touching stories of patients who profoundly impacted Dr. Honey’s career and transformed him personally. A rare, heartwarming gem of a read.

A fresh perspective about medicine and a riveting look into neurosurgery…[The Tenth Nerve] brings the reader into the operating room and reveals the impact that patient and surgeon have on each other's lives.