Anaesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness

Author(s): Kate Cole-Adams

SP 2018

You know how it is when you go under. The jab, the countdown, the-
-and then you wake.
This book is about what happens in between.
Until a hundred and seventy years ago many people chose death over
the ordeal of surgery. Now hundreds of thousands undergo operations
every day. Anaesthesia has made it possible.
But how much do we really know about what happens to us on the
operating table? Can we hear what's going on around us? Is pain still
pain if we are not awake to feel it, or don't remember it afterwards?
How does the unconscious mind deal with the body's experience of being
cut open and ransacked? And how can we help ourselves through it?
Haunting, lyrical, sometimes shattering, Anaesthesia leavens science with personal experience to bring an intensely human curiosity to the unknowable realm beyond consciousness.
Kate Cole-Adams is a Melbourne journalist. Her novel Walking to the Moon is published by Text.


What really happens to us when we are anaesthetised? By this I mean not
what happens to the pinging, crackling apparatus of our nerves and
spinal cords and brains, but what happens to us-to the person who is me
or the person who is you-as doctors go about the messy business of
slicing and delving within us?

`The prose is quite gorgeous-simultaneously tough and tender.' Adelaide Advertiser on Walking to the Moon
`A work of splendid richness and depth, driven by a curiosity so intense
that it hazards at times the extreme boundaries of the sayable.' Helen Garner

$40.00 NZD

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Product Information

Kate Cole-Adams is a Melbourne journalist. Her novel Walking to the Moon is published by Text.

General Fields

  • : 9781925410525
  • : Text Publishing Co
  • : Text Publishing Co
  • : May 2017
  • : Australia
  • : May 2017
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Kate Cole-Adams
  • : 416
  • : 500
  • : English
  • : Electronic book text