Memories of Pain Beyond the Power of Healing*

Bernard Lown, MD

Whenever I read of an Iraqi war veteran’s suicide or of a soldier afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder, I feel a frisson of anguish. My emotional reaction may be due to the many Holocaust victims whom I have doctored. They have taught me that some remembrances of pain and savagery are so deep and tautly embedded that the passage of time can only dilute, not purge.

One memory that frequently surfaces and fills me with desolation does not concern a Holocaust victim. This singular memory I wish to extirpate, but it leaves me helpless. My tormentor is a small, elderly housewife who was never a victim of Auschwitz, Buchenwald or the other charnel places of horror that had pockmarked Europe. This event happened so long ago that I have forgotten much else of that time.

The event I am about to relate occurred 61 years ago. The place was the Montefiore Hospital in New York City, where I was a medical resident. The hospital was then the city’s leading institution for the treatment of chronic disease, with its mostly elderly patients suffering from multiple intractable problems. Jack K., the intern working at the time on my service, was heavyset, ponderous, uninterested, and invariably complaining of indigestion. More annoying was his contempt for these elderly patients. He was impatient to complete the “stinking” internship and get on with his life’s commitment to psychiatry.

Conspiracy and the Corporate State

Bernard Lown, MD

I never cottoned to conspiracy theories of history. Yet throughout my long life I was nearly overwhelmed by their seduction, by their connecting of puzzling dots in the flow of political events, by their seeming logic in accounting for the inexplicable and by their simplicity in forging through the quagmire of life’s complexity. In short, conspiracy made sense. Following Einstein’s dictum that “Explanations should be as simple as possible, but no simpler,” conspiracies glowed with a sheen of simplicity.

Not infrequently, I was momentarily swayed. The problem is that these theories bludgeon one into submission to accept the existing political order. They reduce history to farce with the major players plotting in dark retreats to manipulate us, the marionettes. Conspiracy is umbilically tied to the millennia long reigning sway of religion, with its forces of good and evil. Such ethereal forces can not be appealed to by reason or changed by reasonable action, they can only be appeased by prayer. Identity of the conspirators and their machinations hidden from public view affords no ready target for mobilizing people. These beliefs breed pessimism, cynicism, inaction and ultimately divert from political action for democratic change.

After 9/11 there was much talk circulating that the twin towers collapse was an inside job. Presumably burning airplane fuel was insufficient to melt massive steel girders and have skyscrapers crumble like matchsticks. Witnesses were presented who heard explosions coming from within the buildings seconds before their collapse.

These theories defy reason. They imply that the suicide high-jackers acted in concert with some US governmental agencies. To ferry dynamite clandestinely into the twin towers would have required hundreds of American co-conspirators. Babbling and bragging is a national past-time. It evades common sense, that not a single one of the many involved would have remained silent with friends, family or confidants.

Yet some form of conspiracy can not be so readily dismissed when considering how the US is governed.