READ: George Latham, Physician and Murder by Ernst Weiss

George Latham is a confessed murderer who has written the story of his life as an explanation for his crime – the brutal murder of his wife. He’s also a physician who is more interested in research than in tending to and aiding those in need of his services. As he sees it, his true calling is to find a cure for Yellow Fever, using rats as his lab animal of choice.

Written in the form of a detailed explanation for the murder of his wife, the novel chronicles Latham’s life, from boyhood to convict to world traveller. He has an incredible eye for detail, commenting on the smallest item or event. He is also an extremely unreliable narrator. He makes it seem as if his wife is responsible for her own murder. Every failure is the fault of a colleague, a family member, or a circumstance of life.

Herr Doktor Latham has learned from his father, a failed explorer and an unhappy civil servant, that humanity is divided into two distinct types: frogs and rats. Rats, both human and rodent, play an important part in his life, from experiments to a general view of history and philosophy.

The bulk of the novel concerns the search for the cause of Yellow Fever, which is ravaging the island of C., where Latham has been sentenced for his crime. Because he is a physician, he is sent to work in the hospital rather than into the fields and forests surrounding the main city. While there, he conspires with the other doctors and researchers there to become human subjects in experiments testing their theories about how the disease is transmitted. The philosophical, moral, ethical and political ramifications of such human experimentation provide arresting reading and an interesting foreshadowing of what would happen just a decade later in Nazi Germany. Artists often see the future better than the rest of us.

Latham's inflated sense of self makes him an ideal unreliable narrator. After he's infected himself with the blood from a Yellow Fever mosquito, here's what he says: "My Y.F. had meaning. For the first time since this terrible illness had begun afflicting and killing people, it had meaning. The experiment was a necessary one, whose result would be that things would change. It had great significance. Though I lay powerless in the grip of this awful disease, my mind and my will made me superior to it." He could have easily said, superior to it and everything and everyone else.

First published in German in 1930 and available for the first time in English, George Latham, Physician and Murder is one of several great novels produced in Europe between the two World Wars. Author Ernst Weiss, a Moravian Jew, was highly praised by such writers as Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. Weiss committed suicide in Paris when the Nazi army invaded France in 1940.