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De Imitatione Christi

family, without whom she could not have survived. After the technological triumph of her operation, she speaks at length of the sheer therapeutic effect of people who cared a cliche perhaps, but accurate as most cliches are. Indeed the great moments in her recovery always came from the support of others, as on the night when her parents brought her to a performance of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. She left the concert hall enraptured, and within the next hour found herself for the first time able to coordinate talking with walking, then talking with climbing stairs, and then finally talking to two companions at once. From such successes she went on to recover her former skills and rebuild her whole personality. In all this she was driven by a desire to prove that injured people can be far more thoroughly rehabilitated than is commonly assumed. Some of her therapists rose to the challenge, while others wished her to settle for less. Some were simply discouraging. Miss Gibbs turned herself into a sort of rehabilitation laboratory in order to discover how far the process could go, and her narrative, which is that of a professional observer, will reveal a new and painful world to most of those who read these pages. As a social worker she had been trained to understand herself and consequently to understand others: “Overtly recognising what caused me stress, anxiety, joy, fear, helped me in understanding and accepting the inner unspoken fears of others” (p. 109). Now, when instead of helping, she found herself being helped, she set out to assess the performance of hospital staffs and therapists who came her way. She praises generously where praise is due, but she can analyse dispassionately the defences erected by medical personnel against patients: with some it was an air of infallibility, with others, non-involvement, and with others again, sheer bloodymindedness, but all of them inflicting needless pain on the patients and hindering their recovery. In the pain and stress of a hospital, the staff must undoubtedly protect themselves, but Miss Gibbs insists that many unnecessary barriers between patients and staff would crumble if all staff members were trained according to their capacity to empathise with the patients, and understand theif unspoken fears and longings. Increased rapport would lessen the tension on both sides. To this layman at least, Miss Gibbs’ arguments documented from her own professional/patient experience, are very convincing. When a born writer, trained to understand herself and others, describes without self-pity or self-importance how she rebuilt a shattered life, the result has to be a fascinating book. But at the same time she raises a wider issue: granted the progress of medical technology, how does faith in God and the support of others help the sick person to recover? And indeed, how does belief in God help to make sense out of sickness at all?