Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks Book 1 in the Austrian Trilogy series.

First published 2005

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Beginning in the 1870s, Human Traces follows Jacques Rebière and Thomas Midwinter as they pursue a shared ambition to understand mental illness and the nature of consciousness. Their training takes them through English asylums, Parisian neurology and competing European theories before they establish an experimental clinic at Schloss Seeblick in Austria.

Scientific idealism becomes entangled with marriage, rivalry and personal failure as the two doctors move towards different explanations of the mind. Their work unfolds against the intellectual ferment of fin-de-siècle Europe and the approach of the First World War, while the people closest to them bear the consequences of theories that promise more certainty than medicine can yet provide.