Speaking of Operations

''Emotionally I was reduced to a most primitive level of hope-fear. My feeling of apprehension and insecurity during the first operation was relieved by two factors: the authoritative, calm voice of the surgeon and the comforting physical contacts of [two women] physicians (who stroked my brow, pressed my arm). . . ."

Manhattan Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham had undergone, while conscious, two serious operations for dangerous blood vessel conditions in his legs. Due to the nature of his illness, scopolamine, the "truth drug," was given instead of an anesthetic. While the surgeon's knife cut into his flesh, Psychiatrist Wertham enthusiastically dictated to a hovering stenographer a stream-of-consciousness description of his mental processes.

Results of his study and others like it, he believes, will eventually furnish a psychological guide to both patients and doctors on how to cope with the psychopathological aspects of illness "which sometimes make the difference between life and death."

"My main concern was with pain. . . . During [parts of] the operation it filled my whole mind. There was literally no room for anything else . . . one's emotional reaction to pain ... is partly a fear of more pain to come, of its continuing or getting worse. . . ."

In a dream after the operation, "I was talking to President Roosevelt ... I advised him to make the same speech he had made a year ago. . . . [That was] a grandiose idea ... a compensatory mechanism at a time when my ego was crushed. It signified ... a healthy part of my personality immunizing me against anxious anticipation. . . ."

During one operation, "[I had] a feeling of insecurity, apprehension . . . great pain. I expressed a general euphoria [a sometimes-false sense of well-being]." He also professed frivolity, made such clinical jokes as "I'm against all isms; especially embolism."

On Freud's theory that the sick man withdraws his libido back upon his own ego, Dr. Wertham says: "My libido certainly was withdrawn . . . my interest decidedly restricted [to] my immediate situation."

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