Author | Cathy Rentzenbrink |
---|---|
Country | UK |
Language | English |
Subject | Memoir |
Published | 2015 |
Publisher | Picador |
ISBN | 978-1-4472-8639-4 |
The Last Act of Love is a memoir by British memoirist Cathy Rentzenbrink, published in 2015 by Picador. [1] [2]
It tells the story of the author's brother's accident and resulting brain injury. He subsequently lay in a state of severe neurological impairment for the next eight years until the decision ("the last act of love") to turn off the assisted nutrition and hydration was made. [3]
It became a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. [4] [5]
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Oliver Wolf Sacks was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer. Born in London, Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from The Queen's College, Oxford, before moving to the United States, where he spent most of his career. He interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed his residency in neurology and neuropathology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Later, he served as neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital's chronic-care facility in the Bronx, where he worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica, who had been unable to move on their own for decades. His treatment of those patients became the basis of his 1973 book Awakenings, which was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated feature film in 1990, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.
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Eleanor Anne Maguire is an Irish neuroscientist. Since 2007, she has been Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London where she is also a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.
John O'Keefe, is an American-British neuroscientist, psychologist and a professor at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College London. He discovered place cells in the hippocampus, and that they show a specific kind of temporal coding in the form of theta phase precession. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014, together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser; he has received several other awards. He has worked at University College London for his entire career, but also held a part-time chair at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology at the behest of his Norwegian collaborators, the Mosers.
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and co-director of the Wellcome Trust PhD Programme Neuroscience at University College London.
Dimitri Michael Kullmann is a professor of neurology at the UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London (UCL), and leads the synaptopathies initiative funded by the Wellcome Trust. Kullmann is a member of the Queen Square Institute of Neurology Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy and a consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.
Raymond Joseph Dolan is an Irish neuroscientist and the Mary Kinross Professor of Neuropsychiatry at University College London, where he was also the founding director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging.
Irene Mary Carmel Tracey is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and former Warden of Merton College, Oxford. She is also Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and formerly Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Oxford. She is a co-founder of the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB), now the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. Her team’s research is focused on the neuroscience of pain, specifically pain perception and analgesia as well as how anaesthetics produce altered states of consciousness. Her team uses multidisciplinary approaches including neuroimaging.
Catherine J. "Cathy" Price is a British neuroscientist and academic. She is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.
Professor Patrick Francis Chinnery, FRCP, FRCPath, FMedSci, is a neurologist, clinician scientist, and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow based in the Medical Research Council Mitochondrial Biology Unit and the University of Cambridge, where he is also Professor of Neurology and Head of the Department of Clinical Neurosciences.
Cathy Rentzenbrink is a British memoirist, the author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Last Act of Love (2015), which was also shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize.