The Rack
A. E. Ellis

Penguin Books London 1988

stan bardzo dobry

str. 357

format 13 x 20 cm

waga 290 g

Książka w języku angielskim/This book is in English

This book, by A. E. Ellis (1958), describes the ordeal of a young English student who developed tuberculosis before the advent of effective medication, and was sent to a Swiss sanatorium shortly after the Second World War. It was important to me because it was the first good description that I had read of the psychological consequences of physical disease, and the frantic activities of those who realise that conventional medicine has failed them and that they are dying. It seemed to me a greater book than The Magic Mountain (Mann, 1996); perhaps because it was expressed in an English idiom with which I could identify. The description of the death of the doctors in the sanatorium punctured my fantasies of medical invulnerability, and the image of the student whose body is found high in the mountain clutching a handful of gentians remained with me indelibly. In my first job as a house physician, I was pleased to work for a physician who allowed his severely ill patients to bring faith healers into the hospital.
This book also heightened my awareness of the problems of the dying, and of the complications of medical treatment. It was the first account that I read of hallucinations produced by therapy with morphine. After I qualified as a doctor I learned far more about psychological reactions to physical illness from my patients, and from the experience of being admitted to my own ward with a physical illness during my houseman year. I found, to my own amazement, that my identifications were with my fellow patients rather than with the medical staff, all of whom I knew very well. After four deaths in a single night, I could take it no more, and discharged myself so that I could recover some vestige of composure at home.

David Goldberg, British Journal of Psychiatry, 2001