Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine Review

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(More customer reviews)n the forward to this book by the late, great poet Czeslaw Milosz, he writes "There is a mysterious connection between the human organism and some spiritual energies, thanks to which science alone cannot answer many of our questions about ourselves. So perhaps [Dr. Szczeklik]is right to use the word katharsis, or purification, and go back to ancient Greek drama . . . This way of referring back to the ancient world makes us think of the age-old continuity of the medical profession, which quite possibly derives its high standing from its permanent place on the border between life and death." As one might expect of a poet, that pretty much says it all. One of America's most prominent doctors strongly recommended this book to me; the doctor's wife is a well-known humanities scholar, so when he told me that this book is a deeply cultured reflection on the mysteries that a doctor confronts in his career I was eager to read the book. I've read it twice now, and I must say that the first time I was a little disappointed. Yes, it is an elegant, interesting, gracefully written meditation on the mysteries of life and death, the blankness of suffering and extinction and the human desire to envelop those experiences with meaning and morality. But it is not some kind of intellectually persuasive argument that takes one through a chain of unbroken logic. Thinking about the book and my reaction, I realised that the answer probably lies with Polanyi's concept of "tacit knowledge". Polanyi demonstrates that most of what we know we would struggle to communicate intellectually, from something as simple as a tennis swing to our judgments about the most difficult and stressful situations. The real value of this book, I have realised, is that Dr. Szezeklik, after a lifetime of healing and failing to heal, of saving lives and witnessing death, still believes in the spiritual and intellectual and emotional connections with illness and death, and he sincerely believes in the transcendent meaning of what we experience in life. This must have been what impressed the American doctor who told me about the book. CATHARSIS is not some kind of logical juggernaut--it is an elegant and cultured report back from the mysterious ground between life and death.

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