Bad Medicine - Publishers Weekly

My existent opus, The King Who Strangled His Psychiatrist and Other Dark Tales, is simply a travel done the 3 elements successful illness—doctors, diseases, and patients—packed with startling conditions, cases, and individuals. The celebrated oregon notorious described are not each sick but show behaviour that illustrates the quality condition.

These elements travel unneurotic successful Ludwig II. The huffy monarch who built those enchanting castles successful Bavaria was locked up successful a palace coup earlier strangling his psychiatrist and drowning himself—the lone known lawsuit successful past of a psychiatrist being killed by a royal’s ain hands (so far). My colleagues should work this with trepidation.

Otto von Bismarck (the man, not the herring), the chancellor of the German Empire and the top person of his day, was guzzling and sozzling himself to decease earlier the crank doc Ernst Schweninger saved his life.

Half-forgotten adventurers whose dreams turned into nightmares were Harold Lasseter—throwing his beingness distant searching for a nonexistent golden reef successful Central Australia—and Maurice Wilson, driven by a messianic imagination to ascent Mt. Everest without assistance and succumbing a day’s ascent from the top.

Doctors see psychiatrist Johan Scharffenberg, a leader of the Norwegian resistance; Bernard Spilsbury, the CSI pioneer whose grounds led to astatine slightest 3 men being unjustly hanged; Humphry Osmond, who trialed LSD successful a distant Canadian province; Max Jacobson, who pumped John F. Kennedy afloat of velocity (and astir wrecked the president’s 1961 acme with Soviet person Nikita Khrushchev successful Vienna); the charismatic Leander Starr Jameson, who started a warfare with his impetuous raid into the Transvaal Republic; and Arnold Hutschnecker, Richard Nixon’s therapist.

The aboriginal psychoanalysts were an absorbing bunch. The superb Viktor Tausk, rejected by some Freud and Helene Deutsch arsenic an analysand, died by shooting and hanging himself. Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, the archetypal kid analyst, was murdered by the nephew astir whom she had written. Hermann Rorschach, the inkblot antheral and cult enthusiast, died tragically young, ne'er learning however his enactment had go a meme.

Deception is ever-present. Czech-born transgression Milan Brych, the fake crab specialist, filled a graveyard with his patients successful the Cook Islands. In the property of the net influencer, pert Belle Gibson attracted hundreds of thousands of followers with her assertion of curing encephalon tumors by fare and steadfast manner earlier being exposed arsenic ne'er having had cancer. The publication Sybil, a literate fraud, led to a celebrated movie and to a diagnosis: aggregate property disorder.

Criminals whose exploits are described successful the publication see Hawley Harvey Crippen, a British doc who was hanged connected disputed grounds provided by Spilsbury; Lowell Lee Andrews, the murderer who shared a compartment with the killers written astir successful Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood; and Ira Einhorn, the American New Age guru who battered his woman to decease and lived successful Europe for 2 decades earlier being extradited. Not forgotten is wide murderer Louis van Schoor, who ended up successful the aforesaid jailhouse arsenic his matricidal daughter.

Other assassins not ignored see Dimitri Tsafendas, who answered a worm successful his belly that told him to termination the designer of apartheid, Hendrick Verwoerd. Lee Harvey Oswald gets mention, arsenic bash doctors Edward Charles Spitzka and Edward Anthony Spitzka, begetter and son, who respectively testified astatine the trials of the assassins of 18th-century U.S. presidents James Garfield and William McKinley.

Some treatments and cures travel from unusual ideas. The visions of Bernadette Soubirous created the healing spa of Lourdes but did not forestall her aboriginal death. Milton Rokeach enactment 3 patients with schizophrenia, each of whom believed they were Jesus Christ, unneurotic for 2 years and yet decided that helium had been arsenic deluded arsenic they were successful trying to cure them. Aristocrat Amanda Feilding ran an predetermination run to let trepanning (drilling holes successful one’s head).

Assembled with the immodest panache that pervades my writing, would The King Who Strangled His Psychiatrist and Other Dark Tales not beryllium a publication worthy publishing and letting the nationalist amusement their approval? I person nary doubt. No steadfast would cognize this; they neither read, respond to, nor cull my earnest supplications.

In meantime, having remembered everything and learned nothing, I americium penning astir Helen Flanders Dunbar, the beauteous polymath who discovered accident-proneness and became a unfortunate of her ain discovery. It’s amended than surviving a beingness of quiescent writerly desperation. And who knows? Another rejection gaffe whitethorn get to cheer maine up tomorrow. In each likelihood, self-publishing lies ahead.