[05/31/2010] -- It was a strange sensation reading the first section of James FitzGerald's What Disturbs Our Blood. Growing up as a child of immigrants who spent his first years in Scarborough - likely the most unfashionable of Toronto's suburbs - I'd often wonder about how the city's most entrenched citizens lived. Now I know.

Or at least, because of FitzGerald's brave quest to heal his family's "protection racket," I have an idea of what life in 1950s and 60s Forest Hill, Toronto's enclave of the blue-blooded and well-heeled, was like. In short, it was pretty hellish.

A distant father, a depressed mother, alcoholic aunts and uncles, abusive boarding school teachers, an entrenched culture of repression, and the threat of madness around every corner were masked by a veneer of gentility and wealth.

None of these are new themes for memoirists, but they do serve as an entry into FitzGerald's real mission: unraveling the lies and mysteries surrounding the death of his grandfather, Gerry, a pioneering Canadian scientist and physician whose work helped save the lives of untold Canadians.

It's a satisfying journey, and we are left with a persuasive account of Gerry FitzGerald's accomplishments. Most importantly, he founded the Connaught Laboratories at the University of Toronto, the lab where Banting and Best discovered insulin. He was also instrumental in socializing medical care. The discoveries at Connaught Laboratories, the vaccines, serums, and antitoxins, were routinely given away for free.

His descent into psychosis, then, should come as a shock. Yet what passed for treatment - insulin shock therapy, for example - is more shocking still.

We are invited to share in the author's rage at the rigid, harmful, and even amateurish care his grandfather received at what was ostensibly one of the top psychiatric hospitals in North America. It's a rage that's difficult to resist.

An impressive amount of research is woven into the text without bogging down the story of the elder FitzGerald, who in 1899 at the age of 16 became the youngest member of the University of Toronto medical school.

The hard-to-find case studies, interviews, and helpful historical context give a complicated and complex account of Gerry, a "tortured man at war with himself, possessed of gifts equal to his flaws... believing himself to be God, carrying a lantern into the marketplace, the disturbance of blood firing the engine of intellect."

Freud looms large in What Disturbs Our Blood, and made me wish I had a greater familiarity with the founder of psychoanalysis. As it is, my understanding of Freud is limited to a chapter in a first-year psychology class.

So I'm at a disadvantage when FitzGerald relies on Freudian techniques to help flesh out his own issues. It felt unconvincing. Ones own dreams are rarely as interesting to others (unless, of course, they're paid to be interested), yet FitzGerald peppers his chapters with analysis of his own. It's a tedious and boring technique, as is the tendency to assign meaning to events that may not exist.

In one early passage, for example, he writes of a family photograph: "My father is conspicuous in his absence, literally 'out of the picture'; the photographer had unconsciously cast me, a six-year old boy in neatly pressed shirt and tie, in the timeless role of Oedipus-in-waiting."

The news of Gerry's suicide, when it inevitably comes, is predictably repressed. It's reported as a hemorrhaging duodenal ulcer, the story FitzGerald is fed until he begins his investigation.

His aim is not just to break that silence, but to smash it to pieces. He succeeds. "I have lived out Nietzsche's wisdom," he writes. "'What was silent in the father speaks in the son; and often I found the son the unveiled secret of the father.' I have told myself the story never told me."

And that, too, is the book's greatest success. There is good reason for dredging up the past. Repression is a killer, and needs to be countered and challenged at every opportunity.

Full Title: What Disturbs Our Blood
Author: James FitzGerald
Publisher: Random House Canada
Hardcover: 512 pages
Pub Date: May 11, 2010
Price: CDN $34.95