Human Traces

Jacques Rebière and Thomas Midwinter meet as young men with a shared desire to understand mental illness and the nature of human consciousness. Their friendship takes them through medical training, family entanglements and the creation of a clinic in Austria, where they work with patients whose suffering challenges the limits of nineteenth-century science. The novel follows the early development of psychiatry and psychological medicine while tracing the personal costs of ambition, belief and the attempt to explain the mind.