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Authors: Jennifer Worth
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some of the worst areas of devastation. When a team was assigned to go to Poland to set up a first aid station, she joined them, and went to Majdanek, a death camp, where 300,000 people had been gassed alive. She saw with her own eyes trainloads of children’s shoes and clothes, and trunks full of human hair that had been destined for Germany to make pillows. She smelled the sweet odour of the gas sheds, the smell of death, and the all-pervading stench of rotting corpses. She saw the barbed wire, the guard towers, the spotlights, and the rows of barracks in which men, women and children had spent their last days while they awaited their call to strip and form a line to enter the gas chamber, to fulfil the quota of exterminations for that day. She wandered around, numb with shock, and saw to her amazement, sketched on every wall of every barrack, hundreds of butterflies. What, in the name of Heaven, could impel people waiting in such conditions for their inevitable death, to depict the form of a butterfly? She did not know, none of us will ever know, but it was a concept that would fill her imagination, and haunt her for the rest of her life. It was this image, and the symbolic message sent out by these doomed people, that would eventually lead her to a belief in the God of Love.
It was only after four years of this voluntary work that Elisabeth returned to Switzerland, more determined than ever to become a doctor. She had to start night school in order to learn the basics of science from scratch. There was no help from her father or her tutors, who told her to go and be a housewife, a maid, a seamstress - academia was not for girls. But she had been trained in the harsh school of life and she knew the value of persistence. In 1957, at the age of thirty-one, she passed her final examinations and became a country doctor in the mountain villages north of Zürich. It was a happy time.
It is interesting to speculate on how life turns out for each of us, and how chance plays its part. Elisabeth always said it was the handof God guiding her. If she had not met and fallen in love with a handsome American doctor, she would have remained a contented family doctor in rural Switzerland, probably married to a respectable burger, happy to settle down after the hectic adventures of her youth. Instead, she married Emanuel Ross, went to America, and entered the maelstrom of American hospital medicine. This was where her intellectual life, coloured by her early experiences of suffering, began. She had found her vocation.
Elisabeth had never really wanted to go to America, still less did she want the post of psychiatric resident at Manhattan State Hospital, but it was the only job she could get. She worked with the mentally ill for nearly two years, and learned a great deal about the psychology of the human mind, its dark recesses and closed doors.
One day her chief asked her to examine a man who was supposed to be suffering from psychosomatic paralysis and depression. The man also had an incurable degenerative disorder. Elisabeth examined him, and spoke with him at length. She had seen this state of mind before in the ravaged towns and villages of Europe, and she knew what it meant.
‘The patient is preparing himself to die,’ she reported.
The neurologist not only disagreed, he appeared embarrassed, and ridiculed her diagnosis, saying that the patient just needed the right medication to cure his morbid state of mind. Days later the patient died.
This encounter started Elisabeth thinking, watching, and noting her observations. She saw that most doctors routinely avoided mentioning anything to do with death, and the closer a patient was to dying, the more the doctors distanced themselves. She asked questions of her medical colleagues, but they avoided giving her direct answers, and she gained the impression that very few of them had been present at the bedside at the actual moment of death. ‘That’s not my department; I leave that
It was only after four years of this voluntary work that Elisabeth returned to Switzerland, more determined than ever to become a doctor. She had to start night school in order to learn the basics of science from scratch. There was no help from her father or her tutors, who told her to go and be a housewife, a maid, a seamstress - academia was not for girls. But she had been trained in the harsh school of life and she knew the value of persistence. In 1957, at the age of thirty-one, she passed her final examinations and became a country doctor in the mountain villages north of Zürich. It was a happy time.
It is interesting to speculate on how life turns out for each of us, and how chance plays its part. Elisabeth always said it was the handof God guiding her. If she had not met and fallen in love with a handsome American doctor, she would have remained a contented family doctor in rural Switzerland, probably married to a respectable burger, happy to settle down after the hectic adventures of her youth. Instead, she married Emanuel Ross, went to America, and entered the maelstrom of American hospital medicine. This was where her intellectual life, coloured by her early experiences of suffering, began. She had found her vocation.
Elisabeth had never really wanted to go to America, still less did she want the post of psychiatric resident at Manhattan State Hospital, but it was the only job she could get. She worked with the mentally ill for nearly two years, and learned a great deal about the psychology of the human mind, its dark recesses and closed doors.
One day her chief asked her to examine a man who was supposed to be suffering from psychosomatic paralysis and depression. The man also had an incurable degenerative disorder. Elisabeth examined him, and spoke with him at length. She had seen this state of mind before in the ravaged towns and villages of Europe, and she knew what it meant.
‘The patient is preparing himself to die,’ she reported.
The neurologist not only disagreed, he appeared embarrassed, and ridiculed her diagnosis, saying that the patient just needed the right medication to cure his morbid state of mind. Days later the patient died.
This encounter started Elisabeth thinking, watching, and noting her observations. She saw that most doctors routinely avoided mentioning anything to do with death, and the closer a patient was to dying, the more the doctors distanced themselves. She asked questions of her medical colleagues, but they avoided giving her direct answers, and she gained the impression that very few of them had been present at the bedside at the actual moment of death. ‘That’s not my department; I leave that
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