Terror, Starvation & Trauma in Concentration Camps: Examining Medical Historical Memory
By Ievy Stamatov
As Michael Dorland writes in his book Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival, “the Holocaust – with its unprecedented magnitude in the scale of mass murder, its lasting impact upon most of both Western and Eastern Europe, as well as on so many other countries, if not on “the conscience” of the world – remains in certain ways “incomprehensible.”” His research tries to make sense of this catastrophic event, and shed light on some of its seldom told stories.
After receiving a generous three-year operating grant of $90,000 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Professor Michael Dorland of Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication undertook an in-depth examination into the complex network of medical researchers who explored the effects of prolonged terror and starvation among Holocaust survivors in Europe after World War II. Targeting five European countries, with particular attention being paid to the case of France where roughly 3,500 surviving French Jews returned following their release from concentration camps, Dorland explored the attempts of doctors — mainly in the fields of neuropsychiatry and psychoanalysis — over the course of sixty years to describe the repercussions of concentration camp incarceration. France posed an interesting case for Dorland, originally of French-Jewish descent, because of its complicated war-time history.
“France was initially occupied by the Germans as of 1940 and created a government that was keen to collaborate with the Nazis, especially when it came to anti-Semitic legislation, without necessarily being prompted,” Dorland explains. “This makes the French case in many ways a more subtle one than that of Germany in the repression of postwar memory.”
In 2009, a book based on his research entitled Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival was published by Brandeis University Press as part of a prestige series in European Jewish history and culture. Embedding his analysis of different medical discourses in the sociopolitical history of France in the twentieth century, Dorland parallels the work of the Western style physiologists with that of the ethicists —often neuropsychiatrists — who would initiate a more existential approach to the study of the effects of concentration camp incarceration. This second group, Dorland concludes, took a “holistic, body-soul” angle to research that drew on the Jewish medical tradition as a counter to the mechanical approach of the physiologists that implicitly lead to the profound ethical crisis the camps posed and continue to pose for the medical conscious. Illuminating the peculiar journey of a medical discourse that began in France but took on new forms elsewhere whilst embedding an analysis of different medical discourses in the sociopolitical history of France in the twentieth century, Cadaverland expands into non-medical fields to explore how this constructed memory creates the basis of the “traumato-culture” with which we are familiar today.
The results of Dorland’s ten-year effort is an extensive and nuanced historical study of the Holocaust and medical consciousness over a span of sixty years that has been heralded as a brilliantly written, important, and strikingly original piece of superior scholarship.
“Historical memory is about the difficulties of remembering. Presently, we offload more and more of our memory onto machines, and we end up living in this infinite present in which we have limited understanding of history,” he says. “What drives research is curiosity, and it’s important to let that go where it takes you. There’s a medical unconscious just as much there is a human or institutional unconscious.”