In between appetizers and desserts, the physicians and nurses pondered whether society overmedicalizes basic human conditions - and whether health-care professions in general dismiss an abstract disease of the mind because, unlike a malignant tumor, it cannot be seen or removed.Īlso during the meal, participants delved into a discussion on how public dialogue about devastating war experiences focuses almost exclusively on men. Feibel, MD, (right) oversees the reading group as the School of Medicine's director of the Center for History of Medicine. Timothy Moore, PhD, (left) head of Washington University's Department of Classics in Arts & Sciences, recently moderated a book club discussion among health-care professionals who work on the Medical Campus. Popular reading group discusses works involving death, PTSD, feminism and other topics The way it always will.Visit the News Hub Book club for medical professionals explores field’s human side The soldier’s question hangs in the air the way it always has. The war is gone now, but the event remains, the happening that nearly erased the life to come and thus erased the life that came before. The man on the other side of the soldier’s question is not me. What I previously found inconceivable is now inescapable: I have been blown up so many times in my mind that it is impossible to imagine a version of myself that has not been blown up. Another odd feature of traumatic time is that it doesn’t just destroy the flow of the present into the future, it corrodes everything that came before, eating at moments and people from your previous life, until you can’t remember why any of them mattered.

In the traumatic universe, the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to then and back again. In normal time, you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death.

“Later, I interviewed a prominent psychoanalyst, who told me that trauma destroys the fabric of time.

The Evil Hours by David J. Morris