“If I Were Told the Experience of Medical and Surgical Resuscitation...” The Resuscitation Notebooks of Benoît Misset. The Ethical Powers of Writing
“If I Were Told the Experience of Medical and Surgical Resuscitation...” The Resuscitation Notebooks of Benoît Misset. The Ethical Powers of Writing

Summary/Abstract: The experience we want to report on and about which we are going to start thinking is not entirely new. It has already taken place in several hospitals that deal with medical and surgical resuscitation; many reports of it have been published in medical literature that echoes voices of patients who did fairly well. Psychiatry had already used notebooks for patients, encouraging each of them to keep a diary of which only the author himself and perhaps his doctor and some caregivers had knowledge. But here is what immediately makes the difference between the structure that is fit for the notebooks when they are implemented by Benoît Misset and the structure used in psychiatry. Unlike what happens most of the time in psychiatry, a patient in intensive care is not able to keep a diary. Everything happens as if various characters, who use the pronouns I, we, you, thou, they, she or he, kept the diary for the patient or for themselves, addressing the patient and talking about him. The voice of the medical staff can be heard, like a voice over, giving some information about the state of health of the sick person who enters the medical service, about his/her age, in order to objectively present the situation. Everything we learn about the patient is only known through the interlacing of voices that makes us discover, gradually and in snippets, who he was, who the members of his family, his friends, his colleagues were, and so what his trade was, how he lived and even many of the elements of the state of health that led him to the resuscitation service.

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