La Maladie de Sachs

Martin Winckler

POL, Fr130, pp 474

ISBN 2867446031

Rating:

Evidence based medicine may be an inescapable term these days, for obvious reasons. Odd, though, that doctors have been slow to respond as advocates of their patients' interests as people, not just as bundles of symptoms, with what might be called, if the term were not a pleonasm, patient based medicine.

It is a nice irony, particularly since some countries are still largely innocent of the concept, that one of the strongest pieces of patient based medicine to emerge recently is a French novel, La Maladie de Sachs. The author is a 42 year old former general practitioner who works as a clinical assistant in a Le Mans hospital. “In life,” he confided to a French magazine, “we don't suffer the way it is in medical books. Medical books are works of fiction—and bad fiction at that.” His novel has …