What Disturbs Our Blood: A Son’s Quest to Redeem the Past (review)

When classifying What Disturbs Our Blood, one needs to address at least the following keywords: autobiography; biography; pathography; mental institutions, mental health and therapies; medical innovation and discovery; medical education; along with insecurity; infidelity; sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and jazz! Prestigious medical and educational institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Cambridge, Queen’s, the Rockefeller Foundation, Connaught Laboratories, and the University of Toronto figure prominently in FitzGerald’s personal story; so too, such luminaries as Fred Banting, Charlie Best, and Clarence ‘C.B.’ Farrar. Duke Ellington makes an appearance too, as he knew the author’s father and, after his Toronto shows, would visit the FitzGerald home to tickle the ivories while filling the air with the pungent smoke of reefers – who knew such bohemianism existed in upscale Toronto during the 1950s?

But FitzGerald’s main goal in writing this book is to see through this purple haze and uncover the many secrets that shrouded his and his family’s rollercoaster history. In attempting to redeem this past, FitzGerald had to delve deep into his own, his father’s, and his grandfather’s lives to reveal their painful struggles with mental illness that too often resulted in attempted or fulfilled suicide. On this journey, the author discovers that his grandfather, Dr John Gerald ‘Gerry’ Fitz-Gerald, was a truly significant figure in the history of Canadian medicine. Gerry FitzGerald graduated in medicine from the University of Toronto in 1903 and would embark on a career of neurology and psychiatry in an effort to understand the links between body and mind. After postgraduate training with the eminent Dr Adolf Meyer at the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane (the man who ‘invented’ the term depression), Gerry travelled to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Medical School, where he met C.B. Farrar, who appointed him a clinical assistant in the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, a private institution for the treatment of nervous diseases. In 1906 he returned to Toronto as pathologist at the asylum at 999 Queen Street West.

FitzGerald continued to take extensive trips to the United States as well as key medical centres in Europe, where he was to learn from different research institutes and their functioning. Inspired by these models, FitzGerald created a medical farm ‘factory’ following a rabies outbreak in 1913; this initially modest enterprise would evolve into the University of Toronto Connaught Laboratories, which produced millions of doses of vaccine and antitoxins (against rabies, smallpox, typhoid, diphtheria, tetanus, and meningitis) for Ontario. In the following decade, Connaught would be pivotal in the early production, purification, and standardization of insulin. By 1927, FitzGerald was also heading up the university’s pioneering public health unit known as the School of Hygiene; five years later, he was appointed dean of medicine in the University of Toronto. Then, in 1938, suddenly, FitzGerald ‘went off the deep end’ when he suffered a complete mental breakdown. Two years later, he committed suicide in the Toronto General Hospital, following a previously unsuccessful attempt and after incarceration in a tony American mental hospital where he endured insulin shock therapy – excruciating details of which were preserved in a series of letters between him and C.B. Farrar, who had since become a Toronto colleague and physician-confidante to FitzGerald. Such archival documents well illustrate the author’s research skills.

The biography of Gerry’s son, ‘Jack,’ is disturbingly similar to that of his father. Educated first at McGill and Cambridge, Jack FitzGerald then graduated in medicine from the University of Toronto in 1942; he would also undertake postgraduate study at Johns Hopkins. A successful allergist at Toronto Western Hospital who also had a medical entrepreneurial bent, his life was plagued by strained marriages along with his own personal mental health issues. During his life he was a patient at 999 Queen, Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, Donwoods Institute, and Homewood; he was also subjected to insulin sub coma treatment, electroconvulsive...