Helmut Lauschke - For Justice, Understanding and Humanity

The paediatrician stalked with the face of great importance and his right hand in the trouser pocket through the room and left as the first the superintendent’s office followed by the other colleagues and the pharmacists. I changed some words with Dr Nestor and made some encouraging remarks. Nestor thanked for this kind of support with a smile. “You should know that you are not standing alone.” With these words of confirming my support, I left the office and closed the door.

I changed the clothes in the dressing room and thanked Lizette in the tea room who put a cup of tea for me on the pen-scribbled wooden plate of the small club table. She said that the detonation had caused such a fright that she had nearly fallen out of the bed. Her husband had wondered that the house was still standing and not damaged. The impact was not far from the military camp. “We had luck once again”, I replied and Lizette drew the hypothetical conclusion that things could otherwise go wrong. She asked about the injured and I mentioned the details about the injuries and operations. Lizette called the word ‘disgusting’ and asked which kind of life one can expect after one of these injuries. She answered her question that there would be no future with joy and dignity.

Dr Lizette confessed that she had learnt the fear in Oshakati, since she had not the right imagination of the war reality in the north that she could not get in South Africa. If her parents were informed of the reality in the north, they would have said no, you should not go to Oshakati. I brought a point that there are advantages as well, if one does not know everything or the full story. Lizette understood and put a charming smile on the point.

We went to theatre 2 for the operation on the girl with the skin-connected long fingers on her hands [ syndactyly ]. Lizette put the girl into sleep and the instumenting nurse cleaned the right hand and forearm of the girl with the brown disinfectant solution and covered the rest of her body with sterile green sheets. The skin incisions were done in a zigzag pattern with preparing small skin flaps from the hand dorsum for covering the skin defects in the interdigital folds. The fingers were separated and the skin defects on the lateral finger aspects were covered with multiple small zigzag triangular flaps and the rest with small pieces of full-thickness skin grafts which were taken from the flexor side of the right forearm. I appreciated this kind of surgery with the plactic-reconstructive challenge to improve function and aesthetics of the hand. It was a long operation due to the particular challenge which required patience and skills from the surgeon. The fingers were dressed and the hand got bandaged in fist position. The operation took two hours.

Lizette praised the art work during the small tea break. She asked after the outcome of these operations and I was able to give good news. In the same break Lizette mentioned the young colleague and writer of the story of the forbidden love of the racially mixed couple. She said that this colleague was an interesting person what I fully agreed with and called him an extraordinary person in terms of commitment and gift, since this colleague was devoted to his work as a medical doctor who critically reflected on the burning points of apartheid. “He had put his finger on the small-mindedness of the ruling system. If this colleague keeps up his strength of protest and got his fingers not broken that points on the evil of the moral seediness, we can expect something extraordinary from him.” Lizette said that she spoke with her husband about the colleague who regretted of not having met this doctor.

“How is your husband?”, I asked. “He comes back quite often exhausted. Then he sits in the armchair and is sunken in the world of thoughts”, Lizette answered. I had no problem to imagine the psychologist sunken in his thoughts, because it was psychologically a dubious enterprise to encourage young soldiers without experience to shoot human beings dead, if the young soldier was of a higher level of education and had the pensive character with the fine sense regarding life and its values including the Commandments. Lizette and I had faces of concern about the madness of killings what was against human reason and reasonableness, and an arrogant imposition against the clear conscience. The blades of purpose and reservation did not pair to one scissors where the problem stood between the gaping blades with the axiomatic antagonism of sharpness and cutting properties. The gap between those blades was psychologically not to fill and to close in the understanding of the common sense and in such stronger terms irreconcilable with the human conscience.

I left the tea room to continue with the operations. A young man lay on the operating table with a ruptured left shoulder edge joint and the stand-out position of the lateral end of the collarbone. The anatomic disorder was called ‘the piano key phenomenon’ when the lateral end of the collarbone should be pushed down to get its anatomic position, but came up again when the pushing finger was taken off. After a curved skin incision, the shoulder edge joint were exposed and the lateral end of the collarbone were pushed down into anatomic position and fixed in this position with two wires inserted from the lateral aspect through the shoulder blade spine into the collarbone. The bones were tightened together by the tension wiring in the figure-of-eight shape.

The correction osteotomy [ bone cut and internal fixation ] on the thigh bone of a fourteen-year-old boy was the next operation. The shaft fracture had healed with a malalignment in valgus position [ kink with outward deviation of the leg ]. Therefore, the bone shaft was cut through the kink with the oscillating saw and the shaft parts were brought in anatomic alignment and stabilized by a long nail put into the medullary cavity. The layers of the soft tissue were closed with sutures. A dressing and bandage has finished the operation.

Dr Lizette said during the tea break, while the nurses cleaned the theatre room that her husband would not do long this work with the war psychology, because the demands were simply too high which exceeded the normal physical and mental capacity by far. “What is normal in a war?”, I asked and said: “Also we doctors are over-challenged and over-burdened, but war does not care about human issues and needs, because war is the destroyer of civilization and mankind. War is the devil who swallows the people and its children with the ruthlessness of the laws of likelihood.” Lizette said that war has its own psychology which differs by far from the psychology of her husband. I had the picture of a canyon in mind with the steep faces of the war psychology on one side and of the other psychology on the other side. I said: “I’m not a psychologist, but as far as I understand psychology, it is directed toward the human being to achieve the internal balance and freedom and the internal peace and rejects any destructive attempts that the war brings to a large extent.”

“ The war psychology is not more than a grimace of disgust and destruction that has nothing in common with a psychology of human reasonableness with the great and fundamental values of mankind. It is the schizophrenia in the sick brains of our time and particularly in the moral-diverted brains of the loudmouthed politicians who don’t know what the psychology stands for. They connect the one with the other, the psychology in the human-educated way of civilization with the grimace of disgust and destruction. The ugly face of war psychology belongs in the devil’s pot of the pathology of ‘human’ sciences.”

I felt the agitation of Dr Lizette who stood in front of me. I stopped the elaboration about psychology and its pathology with the ugly face of the war psychology when both doctors went back to theatre 2 for the last operation. An old woman lay on the operating table who had a skin lesion on the right forearm with the clinical signs of malignancy. I washed hands and forearms and was with my thoughts far away to ask and discuss with colleagues the dubiousness and manipulative susceptibility of the psychology and its pathology.