Laughing Death - The Untold Story of Kuru (Hardcover, 1990 ed.)

An often preposterous memoir of the events surrounding the identification of a rare form of encephalitis occurring in a New Guinea tribe - a feat that won a Nobel Prize for its chief researcher. In 1950, the author, who characterizes himself as "a simple young man who knew very little and believed a lot,"was an inexperienced medical officer assigned to provide health services to several "stone age" tribes in Australian New Guinea. With a smattering of anthropological background, a kind heart, elementary medical skills, and a romantic imagination, he became intrigued with a fatal disease that struck one particular tribe and that the natives attributed to magic. Although his own experience was limited, Zigas succeeded in interesting his superiors and eventually future Nobel Prize winner Carleton Gajdusek (Medicine, 1976). But for three-quarters of the book, Zigas himself is its hero; and the reader must slog through his eccentric, garrulous, muddy prose to get a glimmer of light on the scene he tries to describe and his role in it. Even so, there is something naive and endearing about Zigas, and when Gajdusek finally arrives to do the thorough study that won him the Nobel, Zigas pays him devoted though not always lucid tribute. Gajdusek himself writes what seems to be a reluctant foreword, calling these recollections of his helper "historical fiction" and assigning them a brand-new literary category: "abstract expressionist ironical parody." Indeed, the book could pass for parody of a sounder medical-anthropological work, although this does not seem to have been the author's intent. There is the germ of a good movie here, about an innocent, idealistic young doctor trying to deliver some western medicine to a group of primitive peoples speaking "700 different languages" - none of which he is fluent in - and who stumbles upon a disease whose formal identification has implications for other serious slow-developing vital infections. But as anthropology or medicine, it has very limited value; and as a lucid narrative, it has less. (Kirkus Reviews)

Also the task is to evaluate and assess, and to decide whether the work is a novel, or a book of memoirs, or a parody, or a lampoon, or a variation on imaginative themes, or psychological study; and to establish its predominant characteristics; whether the whole thing is a joke, or whether its importance lies in its deeper meaning, or whether it is just irony, sarcasm, ridicule . . . Witold Gombrowicz in Ferdeydurke After procrastinating for over two years since Yin's death on the writing of this Foreword for his second auto biographical work, I finally begin using the above quota tion from Witold Gombrowicz. Yin Zigas was a genius; he was a romatic, he was a physician with compassion, he was a scientist with pene trating curiosity, he was an actor, and he was a loyal friend. He was fundamentally a stylist. Many who knew him compared him to Don Quixote; the younger genera tion compared him to Danny Kaye, not only in his appear ance, but in his speech, movements, and actions. In his first autobiographical essay, Auscultation of Two Worlds, Yin surprised many of his friends by the flamboyant accounts of his dramatic life. I was hard pressed to com ment on this first work, either to Yin himself or to our mutual friends. Everyone, after all, recognized me as his "mentor" in those passages, as they did most of his other thinly disguised characters."

General

Imprint:	HumanaPress
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	May 1990
First published:	1990
Authors:	Vincent Zigas
Dimensions:	235 x 155 x 27mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	315
Edition:	1990 ed.
ISBN-13:	978-0-89603-111-1
Categories:	Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics > Medical anthropology Promotions
LSN:	0-89603-111-X
Barcode:	9780896031111

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