Page 93 (1/2)

Common sense told hies like a stone on his heart until the day he died Until one of his feeble suicide attempts succeeded

So what could Ian do? Return to Selena and apologize, tell her that some heartbreaks were irreparable?

Such surrender was inconceivable All of his life he'd accepted challenges that other men walked away fro the whims of fate

He felt a stirring of ambition The doctor he'd once been lifted his tired old head, peered through the dusty

219

jacket of Ian's soul, and smiled He was a trained physician-once he'd been the best of the best-and he'd sworn to help people in pain And Andreas in more pain than any patient he'd ever treated

Ian went to his bedroo about diseases of the , he went back to Andrew's room and resumed his seat

One by one, he read the books, kept reading until the sun began its lingering descent into the silver sea He closed the last voluht

He threw it across the room and stared dully at the pile of books and papers beneath theHe'd never studied psychiatry before, certainly not with so specific an inquiry in e science, a loose collection of tricksters andto cure the incurable or watch the inevitable Still, he'd thought they knew so their patients

But they were dangerousin their narrow-eneral, and women in particular He stared at the paper at his feet Thomas Hawkes Tanner's "On Excision of the Clitoris as a Cure for Hysteria"

Hysteria That's what they called it when a woman said she'd been raped as a child

"Hysteria" He shook his head, thinking of the articles and ideas he'd read They left hi dirty and ashamed of his profession Dr Freud-supposedly one of the best alienists of the tiynistic profession At first Freud had believed the women who reported that they'd been raped as children, and his theories excited Ian

Then, for no apparent reason, Freud had stopped believing Suddenly these same women who years before

220

had been victi from "hysterical fantasies"