Patrick Froehlich

In the novel Ce côté et l’autre de l’océan (Both Sides of the Ocean), again, we read in Le Monde, the author ponders the question of pattern repetition. He suffered from his parents continually moving when he was young, and wonders if he hasn't reproduced the same pattern with his own children by taking on different positions in Belgium and Canada. Le Monde writes, “We follow him, recovering hidden memory, rediscovering the city of Poughkeepsie, in the Hudson Valley, where his father worked for IBM, attracted by the myth of America and the great computer utopia of the 1970s. Gazing into the mirror streaked with parental and personal fears, the writer is less after revelation, and more interested in stripping away and moving beyond.”

He practiced medicine at the CHU in Lyon as a university professor and hospital practitioner until 2017 and, from 2009 to 2014, as full professor attached to the University of Montreal.

The novel Avant tout ne pas nuire (First, Do No Harm), a work halfway between fiction and documentary, is, according to the leading French newspaper Le Monde, an exercise in introspection undertaken by Froehlich in relation to the theme of pain, the pain he feels as well as that inflicted upon the child in the course of surgery. He explains that his own awareness was long in coming, and reminds us that the newborn's ability to experience pain was not recognized until 1987. The novel begins with his daughter asking this question: “Have you ever hurt a child? Tell me you never hurt a child you were taking care of.” Patrick Froehlich answered No, though “poorly articulated, scarcely audible,” and he points out that “this inability to assert the contrary” concealed “a sense of shame” that he was forced to confront.

Patrick Froehlich (born in Dijon, France, in 1961) is a French M.D. and novelist. For several decades, he has practiced surgery and has published five novels. His main subjects are children's pain, the struggle against disease and the trauma resulting from situations on the edge of life. He has contributed to the development of image-guided mini invasive surgery.

He talks about his writing process and what he learned from composing these two novels on his site. “As a result of the conflicts that shook the generations that came before me (the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, World War I and II, the Algerian War), I began to write about my own war against sickness. First by considering pain in Avant tout ne pas nuire, then through my father and the Algerian colonial war in Ce côté et l’autre de l’océan. This book led me to take on the surgeon’s traumatic memory in a more direct manner, facing the fact of writing in a more unexpected way. The two works are independent, they stand on their own, though they do open onto each other. I end each work by discovering what the next one will be, where my writing will go next. “Writing begins with inner tension. The fear of the subject, and the shame associated with it are excellent motivators. The story begins with my reality, but it is much richer and more complex than my imagination.”