What Disturbs Our Blood ~ Reviewed by Mary McIntyre
Book Reviews Tuesday, May 31st, 2011
What Disturbs Our Blood by James Fitzgerald
Random House Canada, 2010. 512 pp.
Reviewed by Mary McIntyre
What Disturbs Our Blood is FitzGerald’s second book. He shook the Canadian establishment a few years ago when he unveiled the secrets of Canada’s ruling class in Old Boys: The Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College. Amongst many revelations, the one of sexual abuse led to charges and convictions of three former teachers, and launched a class action lawsuit against the college in 2002.
What strikes me on reading What Disturbs Our Blood is the depth of research FitzGerald undertook to expose the truth about his famous grandfather and father: for the book is a hard look at the male FitzGerald line, its strengths, its weaknesses and the mental illness that compelled notable men to commit suicide after achieving international honours and respect for their life-saving accomplishments in medicine.
Author Fitzgerald embarks on his journey with a goal to understand and thwart the suicidal curse that afflicts the family’s male generations before him. The 19th Century premise that insanity is associated with sin, or poor blood lines shamed the mentally ill to endure secretive denial, alienation and ineffective experimental brain and body cures that left many dazed and useless, or worse, dead.
FitzGerald is a capable storyteller. Not once does he trot out the facts without weaving them into the context of the times: 19th century Irish immigration, small-town Ontario, determination for excellence, Canada’s role in the development of world health initiatives, two devastating world wars, 1930s Depression, privileged educations and opportunities, the Jazz Age and post-war booms.
Through generational time lines, the author shows us a balanced view of where it all went right– and where it all went wrong. The author knew little about this mysterious grandfather, Gerald FitzGerald, because a family conspiracy to shroud his shameful death ultimately put out the flame of the man’s personal achievements and his medical achievements for Canada.
How can it be that men of brilliance and vision, men on the front lines of miraculous public health cures that today we take for granted, and men associated with the best minds in psychiatry, succumbed to the hellish depressions for which they see suicide as their only solution?
The author begins his book with his early remembrances of growing up privileged in his grandfather-built home on north Toronto’s Balmoral Street.
I was dipped in the lukewarm baptismal waters of Grace Church on-the-Hill, an austere High Anglican enclave of grey stone that gravely watched over neighbourig Bishop Strachan, the private girls’ school my sister was destined to enter: henceforth, the rituals of my young life would continue to mesh with these institutional vestiges of the Family Compact, the nineteenth century ruling class clique of the British colony of Upper Canada.
Author’s father descends into depression and eventual suicide:
… my father took more and more time off work. He was having a nervous breakdown, but we pretended not to notice. He cried to my mother that he was all washed up, that he could not handle his job any longer, and cancelled appointments with his patients. Only during my archival searchings decades later did Idiscover that he had been invited in June 1966 to attend the official opening of FitzGerald Building, a new laboratory facility on a three-hundred-acre property north of the city, honouring the memory of his illustrious father. Engulfed by a merciless malaise, he declined the invitation.
Author’s grandfather descends into depression and eventual suicide:
… Gerry rests at Connaught Farm, an unprecedented disruption of his long-standing work routine. He has spent his life deftly balancing work and holidays, recharging his body each summer to take a run at the busy fall term. But this fall, it’s as if a steady trickle of blood is leaking from the hull of a battered frigate, sapping his waning reserves of strength. He tries to keep himself occupied with rug weaving and other hobbies, but instead waves of apathy and agitation roll over him: each night, he swallows tablets of Nembutol to quell his insomnia. Edna handles his correspondence and postpones meetings.
What Disturbs Our Blood is a fascinating look at Canada’s role in supplying a desperate world with preventative immunization against devastating diseases like diptheria, smallpox, rabies, polio, diabetes and allergic reactions, showing how a nation became the world leader in inexpensive public health vaccination.
But equally fascinating is a ramble through the Freudian camp of psychiatry as opposed to the professional non-believers who believed whole-heartedly in the invasive and ultimately devastating methods of treatment: Metrazol, lobotomy, insulin coma treatment and electric shock treatment. The North American model favoured the later, and it wasn’t until the mid-20th Century that the European model as envisioned by Freud, shared a more prominent role in healing the mentally ill.
The “Who’s Who” of modern medicine visit between the covers in this book. Nobel prizewinners and decorated award winners push through their ideals and create monumental institutions, universities, laboratories and international connections. But many could not benefit themselves from advances they worked so hard to achieve. The book is peppered with famous suicides that quite frankly boggle the mind.
I highly recommend this book for its style, insights, historical significance and unforgettable hope that the author brings to sufferers of mental illness.
Mary E. McIntyre is a member of Life Writers Ink and The Writer’s Community of Durham Region. Her forthcoming book, Washburn Island: Memoir of a Childhood, is a violent family tragedy at Washburn Island Lake Scugog.
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