RESILIENCE
Resilience in holistic care: learning from a remarkable woman: Alice Herz-Sommer Tamar Witztum Medical student
This essay was originally written for the BHMA 2015 student essay competition. It is a celebration of a remarkable
I am a fourth year medical student at the university of Bristol. When I'm not studying, I have been engaged both in medical research and community work such as volunteering with the NSPCC as well as swing dancing and pottery. Alice Herz-Sommer was a close friend of my parents and was, effectively, a grandmother to me. She was already 91 years old when I was born but for me, she was as young as many other people around me. She has always been inquisitive, alert, and played wonderful music for me. It is only in later years that I have come to realise the extent of her humanity. Not only was she utmost forgiving (for her experience in the second world war) but also, she had her eyes fixated on the future until her last days. But future for her, was not a matter of time. For her, connecting to the future meant becoming one with the flow of what she saw as eternal: music and knowledge. Music, in particular, for her, meant a bridge between the past and the future as it encapsulated the human spirit. I felt that this way of pouring meaning into one’s life in a way that perpetually propelled one into the future is a lesson everyone should learn.
woman, Alice HerzSommer, and her survival, all framed in terms of resilience. Alice is well known internationally as a holocaust survivor and pianist (see moving YouTube video (www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8oxO3M6rAPw).
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It is a social convention to seek medical attention when we are feeling unwell to restore good health. In part, this is due to the more general belief in the role of specialisation in modern society; almost all aspect of human lives have become the subject of specialised experts and medicine is no exception. Following the successes of medicine in prolonging life in the past few decades, it is only natural to seek a specialist response. Nevertheless, I fear that having the advantage of an easily accessible, effective healthcare has led to an increased dependency on others. But such an attitude can be detrimental, undermining the role of an important aspect of the human condition – resilience. Resilience is ‘the quality or fact of being able to recover quickly or easily from, or resist being affected by, a
misfortune, shock, illness, etc’ (www.oed.com). I probably would not be such a firm believer of the hugely positive effects that resilience alone can yield, had I not met Alice HerzSommer. In spite of being subjected to horrendous physical difficulties and ailments, surviving a concentration camp, breast cancer, strokes and the passing of her son, she lived till the age of 110, keeping her faculties about and living alone with only the most basic community care. Some see it as a miracle she lived on her own until she passed and that she was extremely lucky to avoid diseases that are very prevalent amongst the elderly such as dementia from which a third of people over the age of 95 suffer (Alzheimers Society, 2015). However, it was clear to anyone who’d spent even 10 minutes in her company that luck played no
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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Volume 14 Issue 2 Summer 2017
