Resuscitation Narration. Some Comments Written afterwards in the Margins of if “If I Were Told the Experience of Medical and Surgical Resuscitation...” The Resuscitation Notebooks of Benoît Misset. The Ethical Powers of Writing

Abstract

The experiment that we are going to report here on new terms and about which we are going to reflect from a different perspective was already discussed in 2022 in the LUMEN journal itself (Clero, 2022). However it is not at all a question of repeating what was already said nearly three years ago. A few words are necessary for the reader who is not already familiar with this article and even for a reader who may have read it some time ago. Let us reassure the reader from the outset, however: this knowledge is not essential to read this article. But we must provide some clarifications. The experiment we are interested in is not entirely new. It had already taken place in France in around twenty hospitals that have an intensive care unit and there are reports of it in the medical literature, which echo the words of patients who have come out of it rather well (Clero, 2022). Psychiatry had also already encouraged the patient to keep a logbook, of which only he-and perhaps his psychiatrist- was aware. But this is where we almost immediately encounter the difference between the structure of these notebooks initiated by B. Misset and the previous structure (essentially used in psychiatry or neuro-psychiatry): unlike what happens most of the time in psychiatry, the intensive care patient, often being artificially put to sleep to be able to tolerate the care, is not capable of keeping a logbook for himself.