Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Part One Into the Dark
- 1 “Ecce Homo”
- 2 Mexican Childhood
- 3 Palo Alto Schooling, Stanford Student
- 4 Transatlantic Physiologist
- 5 Edinburgh Physician
- 6 Excitable Harvard
- 7 High Altitude and Rapid Descent
- 8 Auden, Anxiety, and the German Mind
- Part Two Redemption
- Part Three Aftermath
- Appendix John Thompson's Writings
- Notes
- Sources
- Index
1 - “Ecce Homo”
from Part One - Into the Dark
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Part One Into the Dark
- 1 “Ecce Homo”
- 2 Mexican Childhood
- 3 Palo Alto Schooling, Stanford Student
- 4 Transatlantic Physiologist
- 5 Edinburgh Physician
- 6 Excitable Harvard
- 7 High Altitude and Rapid Descent
- 8 Auden, Anxiety, and the German Mind
- Part Two Redemption
- Part Three Aftermath
- Appendix John Thompson's Writings
- Notes
- Sources
- Index
Summary
My Crucifix
I am working with the people liberated from a concentration camp at Belsen. Can you imagine what that means? I myself have seen 8000 women: typhus, starvation, despair. Oh God! God! Give me strength to carry on. I work among them from seven in the morning until far, far into the night. Sometimes my strength gives way and I must fall exhausted into the straw with them. Still I lose each day 20–30. I have scarcely any drugs. The patients are still on the most meagre of food supplies. More than half have open tuberculosis—there is no space to segregate them! I bring the shadow of a smile to some poor suffering one. I feel encouraged but then I turn and see the thousands of others and I need to call on every nerve of courage to continue. It requires courage, Karl. So much courage.
The writer of this letter—Squadron Leader J. W. Thompson, Royal Canadian Air Force Number C21106—saw that the end of Nazism did not mean the end of human suffering. Medicine had to be placed on a humane basis or similar atrocities would recur. A specialist in aviation medicine, he rethought the foundations of medical research and physician-patient relations. The despairing eyes of victims prompted him to assist the suffering, rather than analyze and classify them in terms of neurophysiology or psychology. His life became a philosophy of care for the distressed.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- John W. ThompsonPsychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust, pp. 3 - 10Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010