Retired doc pens new "doc-novel"

Dedicates his works to the sick and their healers

By MARION LOGUE Times Correspondent
Delaware County Sunday Times     Sunday, November 3, 1996
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   NETHER PROVIDENCE - Dr. Marcos Krausz, emeritus chief of anesthesiology at Mercy Haverford Hospital, recently turned 80 and believes his golden years are improving his memories of things past.
   "I have a pathological inability to forget," he says.
   Those memories are the stuff of his "docu-novels," the most recent of which is titled "Tincture of Tears and Laughter." Asked why he writes, Krausz replies "Why does a bird sing?" He described himself as an "observer of events," and confesses to "an ulterior motive to teach."
   The small book is a collection of "docu-stories" dedicated to the sick and their healers. Part I is "Health, Healers, Hospitals"; Part II is "Alternative Cancer Treatments, The Common Denominator."

   The true incidents are small life lessons told to help others avoid similar mistakes and to crusade against the exploitation of cancer victims. Philosophically, the book reflects on the still mysterious body-mind connection and instructs medical students as well as lay people to attend to both.
   For example, Krausz, who continues to counsel patients with medical problems, tells of a woman "of strict upbringing and discipline" who had surgery for breast cancer, which had spread to regional lymph nodes. Later she asked the surgeon how much time she had left and without thinking he replied "Two years." She never mentioned this to anyone, and lived as normally as she could for two years. But when the doctor's deadline neared, her behavior changed radically and she simply stopped living.
   The little tale ends: "Obedient as always, she died at the predicted time. The nagging question remains: Would she have lived one year longer if the surgeon had said, "Three years?" . "People have sources of energy within themselves," believes Krausz. "All religions have miracles, and so do all therapies. Religious leaders and medical healers, including quacks, all know this, and there will always be gullible victims. We can't cure that, but it's also true that a certain percentage of placebos and various "alternative" treatments do work, and can only be explained on the basis of something we don't know, an inherent life force, the mysterious power of faith."
   His book offers a cautionary note regarding the well known importance of a positive outlook. "Hope should never be an expensive commodity, and a cancer patient, of all people, should never be charged an exorbitant fee."
   Krausz maintains that good sense, if not innate, can come from a lot of bad experiences, or, more easily, from reading about the bad experiences of others depicted in his book.
   Born in a multi-lingual Austrian village where his father was an elementary schoolmaster, young Marcos was motivated to become a physician when, during his high school years in Vienna, his mother became chronically ill.
   In those days he was a neighbor of Sigmund Freud and attended many lectures by his disciples and other pioneers of modern psychology. This background helped form his convictions on the duality of human existence, and his attention to fundamental questions of human frailty, mortality and dependence on others.

  His medical studies were interrupted by the Nazi occupation of Austria, but completed in Portugal after World War 11, when Krausz graduated from the medical school of the University of Lisbon in 1951. He then spent over two years in post-graduate studies at the Royal College of Surgeons in London and the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh and received his Diploma in Anesthetics from the Royal College of Surgeons of England and Physicians of London. He emigrated to the United States in 1956, repeated residency and internship at Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia, and was certified by the American Board of Anesthesiology in 1960, a year before he became a U.S. citizen.

"Tincture of Tears and Laughter" may be found in area bookstores. Other books by Krausz include his first docu novel, "By Danube, Tagus and Cuongo," and the forthcoming "In the Web of Life" which is already a completed manuscript.
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