Читать книгу Well-Being Therapy - G.A. Fava - Страница 9

When I decided to study medicine, I was not particularly convinced of my choice. The early years were tough: I did not like the topics I was studying in my medical school in Padova, Italy. I was aware that I should consider myself lucky with a future full of promise, but I kept on wondering whether it was the right choice - until something happened. In those days (early 1970s), medical students had yearly chest X-rays. At the beginning of my third year (medical courses extend over 6 years in Italy), I had mine. A few days later I received a letter stating that there was something wrong and to come back for further checking in a couple of days. My first thought was ‘I have tuberculosis’. When I got the letter, I was reading Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain and I concluded that this could not be a coincidence: ‘I have not been feeling well, recently - I thought - I am more tired than I used to be.’ I imagined myself in a sanatorium, far away from my family, friends, and classes. When I eventually went to the clinic for the new check-up, I was a wreck. But at the clinic they told me there must have been a mistake and that my chest was fine. In a matter of seconds, I felt fine and when I left the clinic the sky was blue and there could not be any other medical student happier than I was. I understood that regaining health is a wonderful experience; however, I was never actually sick from a medical viewpoint.

I thus became interested in psychosomatic medicine, a comprehensive framework for assessing the role of psychosocial factors in the development, course, and outcome of illness [1]. However, no one seemed to be interested in psychosomatic medicine in Padova or at other Italian universities. By some lucky circumstance, in 1975 I was able to spend the summer in Rochester, New York, studying with one of the most prominent scholars in the psychosomatic field, George Engel.