The Bookmonger: Be good to your brain

The Bookmonger: Be good to your brain

Published 6:00 pm Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Anyone who has a brain – oh! I guess that’s all of us – may be interested in reading “Whispers of the Mind,” a new memoir written by neurologist Carolyn Larkin Taylor.

Now semi-retired and living in Bellingham, Wash., Dr. Taylor has spent more than three decades in the practice of medicine, much of that time in the Pacific Northwest. She writes that when she started out in med school, she wanted to become an ophthalmologist, but she ended up gravitating to neurology.

“There were so many more puzzles to solve,” she explains, “so much more detective work. And it offered so much more opportunity to connect with the lives of my patients.”

The essays in this book reflect a wide array of patient experiences that she has witnessed over the course of her career. All of these recollections are drawn from actual episodes she wrote about in a journal at the time they happened – it was a technique that helped her process her own emotions as she strove to support individuals who were navigating brain issues such as concussions, strokes, tumors, Parkinson’s, ALS and dementia. (Taylor protects her patients’ privacy in this book by changing names, places and identifying details.)

These cases may have developed due to genetics, accidents or lifestyle.

Taylor feels compassion for patients who have succumbed to addiction, which she recognizes as a disease. She shares what she has witnessed too often with patients dealing with potent medications – the fine between pain management and unbridled dependency.

She’s seen other themes replayed over the years, too. In her essay, “The Complicity of Parents,” she weighs in on the sometimes incompatible pressures in youth sports – to develop competitive athletes, while abiding by protocols for safe play.

Taylor’s son was a student athlete, so along with other parents who were health professionals, she was asked to judge when a player who’d sustained injuries during games or practice could safely get back into the sport.

“This did not make me very popular with the players,” Taylor concedes, noting that “their parents could be even more insistent on their children playing.”

But medical knowledge had to trump fan fervor.

“When an opportunity to protect this precious organ – the brain – was bestowed on me, I did whatever I could to make certain the child in question had fully recovered before allowing them to return to play,” Taylor insists, “even if that meant they must sit out the entire season.”

But that doesn’t mean that Taylor thinks that medical professionals should go unchallenged. In her essay, “Medical Gaslighting,” she notes that doctors sometime minimize or dismiss concerns brought up by their patients. When Taylor experienced this herself as a patient, she knew to demand – and get – better follow-up. Unfortunately, she has seen some patients whose concerns weren’t taken seriously by the medical profession until it was too late for them to recover.

“Whispers of the Mind” shares cautionary tales and stories of resilience. The moral of the story: be good to your brain.

The Bookmonger is Barbara Lloyd McMichael, who writes this weekly column focusing on the books, authors and publishers of the Pacific Northwest. Contact her at bkmonger@nwlink.com