“A palimpsest of thousands of painful, shocking memories”

“As a doctor you can never forget. Over the years you become a palimpsest of thousands of painful, shocking memories, old and new, and they remain with you for as long as you live. Just out of sight, but ready to burst out again at any moment”.

This quote from Cecil Helman’s “An Amazing Murmur of the Heart”, a book I was somewhat tepid when I reviewed, has been resonating with me lately. I have also posted here about Helman’s disparagement of   “Technodoctors”:

 

Like may other doctors of his generation – though fortunately still only a minority – Dr A prefers to see people and their diseases mainly as digital data, which can be stored, analysed, and then, if necessary, transmitted – whether by internet, telephone or radio – from one computer to another. He is one of those helping to create a new type of patient, and a new type of patient’s body – one much less human and tangible than those cared for by his medical predecessors. It is one stage further than reducing the body down to a damaged heart valve, an enlarged spleen or a diseased pair of lungs. For this ‘post-human’ body is one that exists mainly in an abstract, immaterial form. It is a body that has become pure information.

I have been re-reading passages of “An Amazing Murmur of the Heart” lately. While the reservations I have  about Helman’s use of medical anthropology being at times, a little glib, and the “technodoctor” something of a straw man, remain, it is a rewarding text. Here he quotes Dr L, one of “six great doctors I have met in my life”, “an old family doctor, battle-weary and cynical after decades in practice. He’s a traditional, no-nonsense type of doctor, stern and impatient, though he has a warm and kindly core.”

Cecil Helman, from here

Helman has Dr L impart words of genuine wisdom, beyond medical practice:

Every time I see him at work, he reminds that medical practice is about all those tiny, trivial, almost invisible things. They’re the ones that really make a difference. And Dr L is full of advice about them.

“And don’t ever forget about time, ” he says. “Always pay attention to time – and the ways it can affect your patients’ bodies and their minds.” He warns me that time is never linear, and that in emotional terms it can loop and curve back upon itself, at any particular moment. And that some traumatic memories can act like time-bombs, set to go off at some unexpected time in the future.

Helman recalls this in 1994, when the 50th anniversary of D Day sees sudden post traumatic issues, physical and mental, amongst veterans, and again in 1995 with the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps.Dr L also impresses on Helman the importance of touch, of human connection.

Of the three books I reviewed for the TLS in 2014, I thought Henry Marsh’s the best as a purely literary work. Heimlich’s memoir was entertainingly grandiose (and, indirectly, led to my discovery that Heimlich’s own son labels him a fraud, a circumstance entirely misses from Heimlich’s book) Helman’s was the book I was most tepid about, and yet it is now the one which has stayed with me most.