Book Review
Cry of the damaged man
Tony moore
ISBN: 0 330 27228 4; 1991; 144 pages; Picador Sydney;
Peter Lumb
School of Nursing, University of South Australia, Underdale Campus, SA
You don't read about the importance of Bailey's Irish Cream for patients or nurses in intensive care wards, when reading medical or nursing text books. Nor do you read about the efficacy of being held close to a warm breast in preference to pethidine or penicillin, when recovering in the same ward. You don't find references in the index to the healing power of open fires, or read treatises on the nature of energy in recovery from severe trauma. Surely these are issues on the fringe of real health care. They're whacky, in fact! So when a surgeon, turned top State Health Department bureaucrat in charge of co-ordinating all rehabilitation and aged care services in Victoria advocates the above, or experienced the efficacy of some of the above, it could be that the fringes of scientific medicine are fraying.
Medically, this author and advocate of the good life in the ICU, writes with considerable authority. Cry of the damaged man is a book which contains scientific explanations pertaining to aspects of surgery. It is a book which explores the psychosocial impact of very serious road accident trauma. It is a book that contains considerable discussion of nursing practice, as well as a theory on hospital visiting. And it contains the above daring prescriptions. It clearly is fashionably holistic if aimed at health care professionals. But it is not a conventional text book in most senses of the word.
It seems to me that this is a book that deserves consideration by the widest number and range of health care workers possible. This is an autobiography. It is a thoroughly absorbing read. It totally lacks dry-as-dust empiricism. The learned doctor, the author, is on the other side of the scalpel and night bell here and he's suffering. He is suffering as a person. He is suffering as a go-getting male doctor in our society after receiving multiple injuries in a car accident on the way to work on the ward where he becomes a patient. His colleagues meet him this time as a bloodied patient. In part the book explores the role difficulties that ensue, but really that is only a fraction of the story.
It explores what works and what doesn't in the name of nursing. It briefly documents the facts of the matter with regard to the accident and the nature of the injuries. But the essence of the book is Tony Moore's personal, emotional, and spiritual journey, and it is an important essence for at least two reasons. First, it is this particular man's story. Moore becomes an expert from both sides of the bed. That isn't a perspective given to many, and it isn't too trite to say that it isn't a gift given to many either. Moore is changed by his journey, physically in painful ways, and emotionally and spiritually in painful but also gainful ways. We are able to meet the complexity of a damaged and then re-formed person as he dispenses with the surgical mask.
But it is also important for the questions it raises about the journey others travel when, through injury, they/we are deprived of long held identities. In a state of helpless, painful, exhausted discontinuity, based on Moore's experience at least, the person is overwhelmed. Energy to reconstitute or re-develop the person is lacking. Really helpful emotional and spiritual support is virtually unknown. Essentially the experience is undocumented. Conventional nursing texts know little of Tony Moore or other real patients like him. Yet, despite his medical qualifications, he is everyone in the ICU. And this real human experience is undocumented because it can't be culled from surveys, or from controlling variables in a laboratory or from running numbers through a computer. It is undocumented because the experience represents what empiricism rejects, and what Moore had spent a lifetime rejecting. For the time being at least, we have a very meagre autobiographical literature in our society to inform us all.
We have journals full of earnest research. Moore's intense process of personal reflection and injury and anguish doesn't seem to have been an acceptable emphasis for the professionals in health care to pursue. My hope would be that for every medical article based in empirical research for some time to come we get one of similar length straight from the heart-just like this one. Had it been necessary, would the NMHRC have funded this manuscript through to publication? I would have preferred that Tony Moore more wrote about his wife in this book. Moore chooses, for unexplained reasons not to disclose all. Just how do partners cope in this kind of situation? What is their journey? But the question really is churlish. It is a courageous book which discloses so much. It will undoubtedly connect with the experiences of many in our car-damaged society and enrich the insights of many other undamaged health care professionals.
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