On this episode of Our American Stories, as a teenager walking to school in Manhattan, Theodore Schwartz stopped to help a stranger whose car was trapped in the snow. The feeling he got from helping someone who could offer him nothing in return stayed with him. He decided he wanted to spend his life doing exactly that.

He eventually became one of America's leading neurosurgeons, operating on thousands of brain tumors and making decisions where a fraction of an inch can separate a cure from catastrophe. Dr. Theodore Schwartz, author of Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery, takes us inside the operating room to explain what it's really like to operate on the human brain.

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