2023-06-15 08:00:00
Poetry is wanting to live. The neurologist Abraham Gans (1885–1971), Mart van Lieburg, TMGN, 426 pp., 39.50 euros. Order via: tmgn.nl/uitgaven.php
Who knows the name of neurologist and poet Abraham Gans (1885-1971) anymore? Despite his great work and brainpower, his legacy is no longer significant for current neuroscience, says emeritus professor of medical history Mart van Lieburg.
And yet he has been wrongly forgotten, the historian believes, which is why he wrote a biography about him: Poetry is wanting to live. From this, Gans emerges as a man with a ‘thorny life path’. He grew up in the Achterhoek, received a pious, Jewish upbringing, studied medicine in Amsterdam, and focused on neurology and psychiatry. He then worked in various clinics, including in the Dutch East Indies, and was affiliated with Leiden University. Surprisingly modern sounds his view in 1925 that psychiatry and neurology study ‘the diseases of a substrate’, ‘some deviations of which belong to one, some to the other, many to both’. His main claim to fame was his Leerboek der Neurologie (1934), which was regarded as state of the art in the field. But after that it gradually went downhill both in his personal life and in science. His ambition to become a professor would fail because of quarrels and machinations. And already during the Second World War, it almost seems, he had detached himself through reflection and meditation from his family life and his marriages, and sought devotion to the higher. After the war, as Van Lieburg puts it, he put on the prophet’s mantle and developed a religious variant of psychotherapy, ‘in which he himself played the leading role as an interpreter of the word of the silent God’. Gans established herself as a neurologist-psychotherapist, writing Bible studies and, at times, rather bloated poetry for contemporary readers. The author meticulously reconstructs this development and its significance.
Gans’s language, always rich in neologisms, did not get any clearer: his Introduction to Pathology was full of “epic and pathic bions” and “pathergic molecules”. It quickly makes the reader dizzy, Van Lieburg must also admit. Nevertheless, what prompted him to erect this monument for this man? The answer is in his introduction: Gans’s work surprisingly interpreted Van Lieburg’s own cultural and religious experience and he suspects that he is not alone in this. He must also have recognized a lot in Gans’ poetry, which is included in full in the biography.
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