Horror was my reaction to James FitzGerald’s revelations. Part way through, I shoved his book underneath the couch, where it lay for months. I could not deal with the atrocities performed in the name of “medicine.”
Brutal. Electrifying. Melancholy. Illuminating. A scholarly masterpiece.
FitzGerald’s book is two stories. He weaves his search for the truth about the tortured lives of his grandfather and father — and the often unrecognized accomplishments of these two Canadian medical pioneers — with vivid stories of medical history.
The author’s grandfather, single-minded and self-sacrificing, was the founder of Connaught Laboratories and director of the University of Toronto School of Hygiene. Gerry FitzGerald was considered by many to be the father of preventive medicine. The laboratory’s vaccines, serums and antitoxins were provided free to all Canadians — a radical concept espoused by the elder FitzGerald. His death came suddenly and unexpectedly. The reasons and cause remained unspoken.
Image courtesy of Random House Canada
The author’s father was an allergist. In the 1960s this was a specialty as indefinable and strange as was Jack FitzGerald. Like his father before him, Jack held strong to his beliefs. A vehement defender of private medicine, he opened a private allergy extract lab because extracts produced by commercial laboratories had no set standards. He fought to disprove that allergic reactions were due to nerves. Stress and depression were effects, not causes, he argued. Sadly, he slipped into mental illness, as had his father before him, and disintegrated gradually, silently. Both men were eventually forgotten — in most history books, and in the Canadian psyche — hidden away like the shame and darkness of their mental illnesses.
The author, haunted by his family’s carefully hidden history, exposes the mania and treatments (or lack thereof) of his grandfather and father. In so doing, he tears apart the underbelly of 20th century medicine. We get an insider’s look at the opposing views on mental illness prevalent in the early 1900s.
We learn of the battle between Freud, with his disturbing theories, and the medical establishment, with its often radical procedures: lobotomy, insulin shock or the removal of gallbladders, stomachs, testicles, ovaries or colons in an attempt to “rip out” the root cause of mental illness – poisonous toxins.
FitzGerald takes us down the road of insanity walked by two greats of Canadian medicine and opens our eyes to a history left behind. As with his valiant work on Upper Canada College, the silence has been broken. This book will rattle your soul.