SLEEP OF LIFE (5 july 2004)
A young woman is taken to the operating theatre. She suffers from a malignant tumour, which has to be removed from her right breast.
With leather belts she is tied to the operating table and the tumour is cut away ... without any anaesthesia! This is how Richard Gordon's The Sleep Of Life begins.
The book is a novel that tries to reconstruct the introduction of anaesthesia halfway the 19th century.
The book has its strong points. For instance, it offers a good historic perspective when we read that Pasteur was twenty-two years old (in 1845) and an important cause of death after operations was the fact that hardly anything was known about infections. A pioneer in the field was to be Robert Koch -- who was just born at the time.
But I can imagine that some readers will be bored by other historical digressions, which seem hardly more than a by-product of the writer's research. To those who have not been educated with massive doses of English history, they look rather irelevant.
The book has both boring and entertaining passages. An example of the former is Romilly's visit to the Simpsons' preceding the demonstration of chloroform later that evening. Compared to the drab description of that event, Pride And Prejudice is a thriller. But a little later we see that Richard Gordon can also write interesting stuff: Simpson delivering a brilliant riposte against the bigotous clergy who want to prohibit painless birth.
The book is especially interesting when it gives an account of relevant medical history. I found the story of the Broad Street pump as the source of cholera, quite interesting.
I can imagine that the indirect style the book sometimes displays is not everybody's cup of tea. For instance, instead of for 24 hours, we read: as the small hand of my watch accomplished its next two sweeps of the face.
Still, to those who are prepared to work their way through the book, it offers a good account of an important period in medical history.
