What Disturbs Our Blood James FitzGerald
(published by Random House Canada)
What the judges said:
"Author James FitzGerald hails from two generations of doctors whose medical achievements left a great impact on the Canadian health system. But these great men also suffered great falls that the FitzGerald family kept secret. Not only is this memoir a gripping, deeply personal story about family relationships and family secrets, it is also a fascinating, well-researched history of Toronto, Canadian medicine and public health, and the treatment of mental illness."
James FitzGerald is born into the gothic house of Dr. Gerald FitzGerald, his long dead grandfather, a brilliant yet tormented pathologist of Irish blood and epic accomplishment, whose vaccines saved untold lives but whose memory has been mysteriously erased from public consciousness. As the boy watches his own father, Jack — also an eminent doctor — plunge into a suicidal psychosis, he intuits, as the psychiatrists do not, some unspeakable secret buried like a tumour deep in the multi-generational layers of the family unconscious. Growing into manhood, he knows in his bones that he must stalk an ancient curse before it stalks him. To set himself free, he must break the silence and put words to the page.
James FitzGerald
(photo by Christine Buijs)
James FitzGerald is a journalist and author whose first book, Old Boys: The Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College, was a controversial inside look at the attitudes and mores of Canada's ruling class. Revelations of the sexual abuse of boys at the school, first published in the book, led to the charging and conviction of three former teachers and the launching of a class action lawsuit against the college in 2002. The article that sparked What Disturbs Our Blood won a National Magazine Award.
Excerpt from What Disturbs the Blood
My story opens in the haunted house of my birth. Three storeys tall, nearly a century old, the place stands silent in my memory, as lean and austere as the midnight hands of a grandfather clock. Erected by my paternal grandparents at the outbreak of the Great War, the timbered beams, grey stuccoed walls, dormered windows, and chimneyed roof cast the sombre shadows of a past that holds me still. Night after night, my adult dreams still pull me down, back through its darkening staircases and corridors, nudging open the door of the nursery where I slept as a child.
James FitzGerald
James FitzGerald