Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer

Ernst Weiss (1882-1940) was an Austrian surgeon of Jewish descent who gave up his medical career to become a writer, after contracting TB and working as a ship doctor and a military physician. He became close friends with Franz Kafka, and eventually moved to Paris in 1934 to escape from the Nazis. There he lived in poverty, with support from Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig, until he committed suicide as the Nazis invaded the city. His novel Georg Letham. Arzt und Mörder was written in 1931. It did not appear in English translation until Archipelago Books published it in January of this year. Georg Letham is a physician and bacteriologist who finds himself in a state of desperation, as he is trapped in a marriage to a wealthy woman he does not love, and he is out of money, as he has neglected his clinical practice to focus on his reserach of the toxin that causes scarlet fever. In an act that is both planned and spontaneous, he murders his wife, but is soon caught, after he confesses to his father. Letham seems to lack remorse during his trial, and is quickly convicted of his crime, but is spared the death penalty thanks to former colleagues who spoke on his behalf. He is given a life sentence of hard labor on an island off the coast of Brazil, and is transported alongside other prisoners on a steamer. He bribes an officer on the ship, and is permitted to treat other prisoners in the ship's sick bay that have become afflicted with typhus. After an arduous journey, the ship arrives at the unnamed island, and he is designated for work at a hospital that specializes in the care of those infected with yellow fever. The cause of yellow fever was not known at that time, and Letham soon learns that several of his physician colleagues from Vienna have also come to investigate this plague. He is permitted to assist the researchers, and soon becomes a member of the team. The researchers hypothesize that the illness is transmitted from bites of infected mosquitoes, but it appears that only monkeys and humans are affected by the disease. The researchers decide to undertake a risky research study, by infecting themselves with mosquitoes that are allowed to bite patients hospitalizaed with yellow fever, which is an untreatable and often fatal illness. Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is told from the view of Letham, a most unreliable narrator, whose motivations and rationale for his actions reveal his depravity. He claims that his father, a despicable man whose story is described in detail, is the cause of his amoral character and personal failure. He seems to be unable or unwilling to care about anyone else, except for a young girl who succumbs to yellow fever under his care. His decision to participate in the study of yellow fever initially seems heroic and noble, but this is not the case. The story is a frame for the study of a man of medicine and science in the early 20th century, a time in which ethical behavior and the compassionate care of the pati

The classic symptoms of a sociopath are a wanton disregard for right and wrong and an inability to care about the feelings of others or the tenets of law or societal norms. Most sociopaths can be defined fairly early in life by their behavior and attitude. With this in mind, I began what I thought was a story about a sociopath. In Georg Letham, Physican and Murderer by Ernst Weiss, the main character Letham is a classically trained physician who specializes in research in the distasteful specialization of vivisection. In the initial chapters he confesses his role in the murder of his wife with no apparent remorse. In fact, he only did it because he needed her money and she refused to "voluntarily" die of her own volition. He complains about his wife and his father, both of whom held the key to his financial betterment: "Neither of them could give me what I yearned for in the depths of my soul, but there was one medicine that they could have given me to ease my suffering: the original medicine, money." Circumstances after the murder unravel and his perfect plan fails spectacularly. He ends up carted off as a 'common' criminal to a life sentence, a fate made more demeaning by the extremely high opinion he had of himself. As he acclimates to incarceration and is transported to a tropical prison camp, he explains more of his childhood and more of his relationship with his father. He reveals in slow and painful detail exactly what his father did to make him a strong man, and suddenly the diagnosis of classic schizophrenic becomes vague. Because while he clearly was influenced by his father's hateful and moral deficiencies, he never outright blames him or uses him as an excuse. He accepts all responsibility himself for his crime and also acknowledges his own moral failure. A true schizophrenic never accepts blame. Throughout this first half of the book to this point, the reading has been complicated and painful; the details were horrifying and unsettling. However, in his new location in the tropics, a change occurs in his life that confirms that Georg Letham is no sociopath. He is allowed to work in the medical field again, this time doing research to find a cure for the deadly Yellow Fever that haunts the tropical regions. A parallel is drawn between the rats his father abhorred and tried forever to eliminate with Georg's efforts to find a remedy for this similarly persistent and deadly danger. While his father was led into the depths of moral depravity because of his inability to control the deadly rodents, Georg rises morally by putting himself at risk for the welfare of others by trying to have some effect on the deadly disease. Throughout the second half of the book we see him change, yet he never transforms completely. That would be too easy and too unrealistic. A fascinating part of the text is the medical aspects of the study of disease, and how diseases like Yellow Fever are transmitted. This is a far more interesting