Human Traces

by: by Sebastian Faulks

Published by: VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

Reviewed by Michele E. Davis

Our main protagonists, Rebiére and Midwinter, meet in 1880, when they are both twenty-years old and destined for greatness in the burgeoning filed of alienism, or “mad-doctoring.” Slow-moving and deliberate, the struggle of understanding madness is helped by lectures from Charcot, a famous neurologist. Rebiére has a brother, Olivier, who seems to have all the symptoms of schizophrenia, although this disease, when the two doctors start their journey, hasn’t been diagnosed yet.

Midwinter and Rebiére are forever tied together, not just because of their joint venture in mad-doctoring, the establishment of a stunning sanitarium in Carinthia, but also because Sonia, Midwinter’s sister marries Rebiére. Fate twists and distorts, and Katherina A., an initial patient of Rebiére, who is a young woman suffering from mysterious debilitating pains in the abdomen and arms and hand joints, is initially thought to be suffering from hysteria.

Midwinter reads his partner’s case study and determines that her illness is not hysterical in origin, but physical, and rushes her off to Vienna for ovarian surgery that cures her. Subsequently, Katherina A. becomes Midwinter’s wife, Kitty. Sonia births a son, Daniel, while Kitty delivers twin girls, Martha and Charlotte. Life plods on in the deliberate slowness of the era, all the while readying us for Sonia’s fleeting thought at the end of the novel, “…human beings could live out their whole long life without ever knowing what sort of creatures they really were. Perhaps it did not matter; perhaps what was important was to find serenity in not knowing.”
Interesting and dynamic subject matter with all the requisite drama of a book this size, over 600 pages.

Armchair Interviews says: This is an excellent historical read based on the birth of psychiatry.