A review of Tadeusz Szczeklik’s Catharsis: On the art of Medicine

Asclepius was the child of Apollo and Coronis, a mortal princess. Out of jealousy, Apollo struck Coronis with a lightning bolt when she was pregnant, but rescued the child in her womb. Medicine  begins with a femicide. We've always suspected as much.  But as always in the heavily redacted and montaged world of myth (where all that is deep is condensed with all that is shallow, where the cartoon apes the archetype), there is another story too: that Chiron the Centaur, who taught Achilles, also taught Asclepius. He taught music as well, which is how Achilles cured himself of his anger towards Agamemnon. As well, he taught the virtues that calmed the soul. Thus, as is pointed out in Tadeusz Szczeklik’s Catharsis: On the art of Medicine, Chiron taught medicine, music and justice as entangled one with the other and, ultimately, one.

There’s a certain kind of medical essay, a book-like essay, that obscurely keeps the faith with that unity. Lewis Thomas in the U.S. is the best known practitioner – Szczeklik was that figure in Poland.

One expects, from these essays, certain doxa: information that has the righteous aura of believe it or not. You will learn, in Catharsis, for instance, that there are 82 distinct terms for different types and properties of the pulse listed in Dorland’s Medical Dictionary. There’s paradoxical pulse, there’s bigeminal pulse, there’s thread pulse, and so on.

The music in Catharsis begins, literally, with the heart beat, and goes through myth and personal experience – the case studies, patient’s whose histories are eccentric, revelatory – and science.

Before the Internet there was Indra’s net. There was as well Ananke’s – Ananke, the Greek goddess of fate. Although Goddess is not quite right – the net of fate was stronger than the Gods. This is the starting point.  The essays in Catharsis are oriented to the modern mythographerk, Roberto Calasso,k taking myth as a soundtrack, lifetrack, culturetrack. In the vocabulary and procedures of medicine,  Szczeklik sees a thousand ties to what lies outside the “science of medicine”. In order to see this, Szczeklik seizes on the terms and practices of the doctor, for instance the “anamnesis” – the name for the patient’s recounting of his history – which Szczeklik associates with Plato’s notion that memory precedes perception in the order of knowledge. In medical terms, the patient’s story precedes the doctor’s observation. The net in which all cause and effect is caught, where memory and observation converge, is what medicine is always going to be about, at least practically. Ethically – which is to say socially and politically – it is about catharsis, purification. 

“Some people have assumed that the text about katharsis in the Poetics has been amputated by an “unknown censor”; others have expressed the view that it was the subject of a separate, irretrievably lost essay. Some have even said in hushed tones that the Stagirite deliberately left the crucial issue of art open ended, because it eludes unambiguous intertpretation. Did he perhaps notatice that in the first syllable of the word he meant to define an ancient, unfathomed mystery lay spellbound? We fist find “Ka” at the beginning of the history of ancient Egypt as “one of the most difficult concepts for the Wewstern mind to grasp”. It was associated with the force that sustains life, the power of creation, and the soul of man. Centuries earlier, at the dawn of Hindu civilization, Kas was the name of the father of the gods, the life-giving element that pervaded the world. The god’s name Ka meant “Who?” – and the first reaction to it was “boundless awe”?”

This is the theme that links Szczeklik’s humanism to his Catholicism. It is a seductive idea that Szczeklik presents without presenting its opposite – something like Bataille’s notion that filth (can) make us free. Something like the feminist notion that the construction of the virtue of purity has participated in that original, Apollonian femicide. The anti-humanistic theme is not addressed or even very addressable from Szczeklik’s point of vantage. 

The strong tones that contrast pollution and purity slow down Catharsis as it travels from Paracelsus to modern discussions of, say, doctor assisted suicide, which prompts credal negations that are all the more disappointing in as much as we know the vast referential pharmacopiea that Szczeklik deals in earlier is dispensed with abruptly by references to Pope John Paul.

Still: I’d recommend this book to anyone looking for medical essays this plague season. It should be cut, I think, with the harsher diatribes of James Le Fanu’s The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, which I reviewed in 2001, here.