Originally known as psychosurgery, this uncommon approach to mental health care involves operating on the brain to alter its function. After lobotomies left many vulnerable patients disabled in the mid-20th century, the practice lost momentum and acquired a stigma. But surgeons in the field continued to refine their techniques. Now, psychiatric neurosurgery, a more nimble descendent, has seen an uptick in the treatment of conditions like severe OCD, and — more rarely — treatment-resistant depression and anxiety. Researchers say it may also prove beneficial in other hard-to-treat conditions, like anorexia nervosa. In other words: Some now believe that for a small group of patients who have exhausted standard therapies, the removal of brain tissue is a valid treatment path.
There’s something about luck that inspires skepticism or rejoinder. Partially, it’s a question of terms. It’s hard to agree what exactly we’re talking about. The word is slippery, a kind of linguistic Jell-O. The critiques come from left and right, from those who see luck as a mask for privilege and those who see it as an offense to self-made men. Voltaire, with the confidence of the encyclopedist, once declared that one can locate a cause for everything and thus the word made no sense. Others dismiss it as mere statistics, still others as simply a term the godless use for God. It can call to mind an austere medieval manuscript, two-faced Fortuna, one side beaming, the other weeping, ordinary humans clinging to her fickle wheel.
When the RMS Titanic sank on the night of April 14-15, 1912, some 1,500 men, women and children lost their lives. News accounts told of victims going “down with the ship” or coming to rest in a “watery grave.” However, hundreds of passengers and crew members had left the ship before it split apart, disappeared beneath the waves and settled at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, two and a half miles down. These individuals floated in the sea, buoyed by cork-filled life vests, until the freezing water sucked the heat from their bodies. Although the official cause of death was often listed as drowning, most victims are believed to have died from hypothermia and related causes. In the coming days and weeks, their corpses would be carried by the currents, spreading over a vast area. Some would not be found for a month or more. Others would never be found at all. Today, close to 1,200 Titanic victims overall remain unaccounted for.
It is of course the critic’s bad habit to read autobiography into fiction, but Porter has conjured such intensity here, and such tangibly real characters, that it feels like the gospel truth. This is a book that works both as a tribute to those who died of the cruellest disease, and as a more general lament to love, loss and remembrance. It is profoundly, bracingly human.
I first saw one of the ISMs books in a museum bookstore—the Whitney’s, I think. Pale blue, beautifully made and about the size of my hand, Hirst-isms felt like something I wanted to own, even before I opened it up and began browsing through the quotations by Damien Hirst: “Life’s infinitely more exciting than art” and “If I believe in art as much as I say I do I’m lying; but I do.”
An urgent call to arms and a necessary popular education in one of humanity’s most profound illnesses, Everything is Tuberculosis will stand out as one of the best non-fiction reads for 2025, suitable for almost any reader.