A recent visit to Santa Fe Queen Square
It was our first
visit to Santa Fe in New Mexico Ghost
Range , White Sands and Bandelier came to mind and of course there is
Alamos, home of the Atomic Bomb that eventually finished off the Japanese and
their atrocity especially in China
Everybody is
afraid of Dr. Haffner at the Regional Child Psychiatric Clinic. O.K. He is tall and quite formidable. He
still carries a strong Austrian accent. But
he never shouts and he speaks very gently.
Perhaps it is because he seemed to know a good deal both within and
without the medical field. As a chief,
he is unusual in knowing most things that people get up to. One day, I was late with a family and when I
got back to the office, Dr. Haffner was there looking through a number of files
by the filing cabinets. It was then that
I knew how it was done. But I am not
going to tell you if I pick up this little trick from him.
Secretly though, we
do know that we must take note of his utterances as he would have thrown in
some gems that would affect our thinking.
Good teachers do throw in a new way of looking at things which may
indeed be too obvious some times.
I later found out
that he probably was one of the first to establish the three unusual in-patient
units in one setting in the whole of Britain
His take down of
Eysenck and IQ test is the first shock I encountered and one of the side
effects was years later when our girls were grown up, without prompting at all,
they thanked me for never doing an IQ test on them. His most memorable example was how a very
high IQ genius when asked to pick up 3 lbs of tomatoes would fail abysmally
when a untested child that has helped father at a market would come very close
to it.
One day he
announced that he is going to do a special presentation. This is not something that happened often and
when it did, we all make sure that we rearrange our appointments.
This was about two
twins that were hardly six years old; identical twins. One day father was taking the younger twin to
some activity. The parents always felt
that it was important to bring them up separately although other parents of
twins have the opposite view. Unfortunately they were involved in a very serious car
accident. Both survived. The boy
suffered fairly serious concussion and was unconscious for around ten
days. He was eventually referred to Dr.
Haffner.
The essence of his
presentation was that he felt the brain can somehow recover and one advantage
would be related to the young age of the patient. At the beginning, the boy could not remember
who he was and there was hardly any speech.
Mother decided to give up her teaching job to spend as much time with
him. From Dr. Haffner’s presentation, he
has suggested that the parents should perhaps treat him as a new baby so that
he can learn everything afresh. It was a
difficult first few months and then suddenly everything progressed
rapidly. Nine months after the accident:
“I arranged for an IQ test and he is now within 10% of his brother!”
Wow!
“And IQ test does
have its place!” He read my mind.
A recent visit to
It was our first
visit to
Everybody is
afraid of Dr. Haffner at the Regional Child Psychiatric Clinic. O.K. He is tall and quite formidable. He
still carries a strong Austrian accent. But
he never shouts and he speaks very gently.
Perhaps it is because he seemed to know a good deal both within and
without the medical field. As a chief,
he is unusual in knowing most things that people get up to. One day, I was late with a family and when I
got back to the office, Dr. Haffner was there looking through a number of files
by the filing cabinets. It was then that
I knew how it was done. But I am not
going to tell you if I pick up this little trick from him.
Secretly though, we
do know that we must take note of his utterances as he would have thrown in
some gems that would affect our thinking.
Good teachers do throw in a new way of looking at things which may
indeed be too obvious some times.
I later found out
that he probably was one of the first to establish the three unusual in-patient
units in one setting in the whole of
His take down of
Eysenck and IQ test is the first shock I encountered and one of the side
effects was years later when our girls were grown up, without prompting at all,
they thanked me for never doing an IQ test on them. His most memorable example was how a very
high IQ genius when asked to pick up 3 lbs of tomatoes would fail abysmally
when a untested child that has helped father at a market would come very close
to it.
One day he
announced that he is going to do a special presentation. This is not something that happened often and
when it did, we all make sure that we rearrange our appointments.
This was about two
twins that were hardly six years old; identical twins. One day father was taking the younger twin to
some activity. The parents always felt
that it was important to bring them up separately although other parents of
twins have the opposite view. Unfortunately they were involved in a very serious car
accident. Both survived. The boy
suffered fairly serious concussion and was unconscious for around ten
days. He was eventually referred to Dr.
Haffner.
The essence of his
presentation was that he felt the brain can somehow recover and one advantage
would be related to the young age of the patient. At the beginning, the boy could not remember
who he was and there was hardly any speech.
Mother decided to give up her teaching job to spend as much time with
him. From Dr. Haffner’s presentation, he
has suggested that the parents should perhaps treat him as a new baby so that
he can learn everything afresh. It was a
difficult first few months and then suddenly everything progressed
rapidly. Nine months after the accident:
“I arranged for an IQ test and he is now within 10% of his brother!”
Wow!
“And IQ test does
have its place!” He read my mind.
Back to
There was a little table with a pile of books and a little picture: Climbing Back. A lady was behind the stall and she does not look like the usual market vegetable selling person. So I started chatting to her. She was promoting her book about her son’s journey back to life after a very serious accident.
Her name is Elise Rosenhaupt and her book is called Climbing Back: A Family's Journey through Brain Injury[1].
It was about her son Martin, who at the start of his second year at Harvard, was hit by a car and thrown 150 feet. He landed on his head, suffering severe traumatic brain injury. So if anything it was much worse than Dr. Haffner’s patient who was thrown about at the back of the car although not much was known about how badly hit he was. It was interesting to scan through her observation of the slow process of recovery, probably much slower than the much younger boy.
It is a nice confirmation of how much more we know about our brain and nervous system.
Do No Harm is a remarkably simple book. So much so, The Guardian (the book was short listed for The Guardian ‘First Book Award’) asks, ‘Why has no one ever written a book like this before?’ Each chapter’s starting point is a real life case. The clinical and extra-curricular vignettes recited allow the reader the privilege of being a fly-on-the-wall during moments of incredible personal and professional strain, sometimes during frank disaster, and occasionally during enormous relief and hilarity. In total, the book makes up a lean, unadorned, honest memoir of just some of the emotional thrills and surgical spills from a life spent in a busy tertiary neurosurgical unit. There is no twisting, confluent, fictional, engineered storyline because the quotidian of Marsh’s operating theatres, clinic rooms and foreign trips provides a surplus of heroes and heartache to sate the appetite of even the most demanding reader, publisher or dramaturge.
Link: https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2015/02/10/the-reading-room-a-review-of-henry-marshs-do-no-harm/
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