Jack El-Hai: Too Close To The Subject
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2014
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Writer Jack El-Hai worries about his own state of mind when he spends time in the files of the psychiatrist who examined Nazi leaders. Jack El-Hai is the author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII (PublicAffairs Books) and The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness (Wiley). He has contributed articles and essays on science, medicine, and history to The Atlantic, Wired, Scientific American Mind, and many other magazines. Jack teaches nonfiction in the MFA program in creative writing at Augsburg College and lives in Minneapolis. Help keep us going! If you love the podcast, please donate here: http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | I felt... |
| 0:07.0 | I felt... |
| 0:08.0 | I was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment... |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | Hey, everyone. Hey everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring |
| 0:27.7 | your true stories of how science has affected people's lives. Two really great shows are coming |
| 0:32.3 | up. We'll be at the Philadelphia Science Festival May 1st and at the New York Hall of Science, |
| 0:36.6 | April 29th. |
| 0:37.8 | More info at storycollider.org. |
| 0:40.9 | This week's story is from Jack L. High as part of our show, The Dark Side. |
| 0:45.3 | The story was recorded in December 2013 at Littlefield in Brooklyn. |
| 1:09.0 | Somehow... Somehow, and I don't quite understand how, I have become a biographer of renegade scientists and physicians. And when I start on a project, one of those projects, this is how it works. |
| 1:13.6 | I often start looking at papers, manuscripts. |
| 1:18.6 | And there are manuscripts like the collected papers of the doctor who advocated and developed lobotomy as a treatment for psychiatric illnesses. |
| 1:32.3 | Or sometimes I look at photographs, studying them for clues into this person's life and insights. |
| 1:40.3 | Photos like, for instance, images that I've seen taken of autopsies at |
| 1:47.0 | at state mental hospitals and then I often rely a lot too on interviews |
| 1:54.0 | people who knew my subject spouses friends enemies friends, enemies, children. |
... |
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