Patrick Froehlich

Patrick Froehlich (born 8 May 1961) is a French M.D. and novelist. For several decades, he practiced surgery and has published six novels. His main subjects are children's pain, the struggle against disease and the trauma resulting from situations on the edge of life. He contributed to the development of image-guided mini invasive surgery. Froehlich lived in Lyon, Brussels, and later settled in Montreal. He is the author of six novels. He began by publishing numerous scientific articles and works in the area of airway pediatric surgery of the respiratory system. He contributed to the development of imagery-guided, minimally-invasive surgery. He practiced medicine at the CHU in Lyon as a university professor and hospital practitioner until 2017 and, from 2009 to 2014, as a Full Professor attached to the University of Montreal. He has written the trilogy Corps étrangers (Foreign bodies) for Les Allusifs publishing house (Montreal). These are fictions that spring from real situations: the pain that children suffer, the fight against sickness, the effects of situations encountered by surgeons at life's far extremes. The novel Avant tout ne pas nuire (First, Do No Harm) ( Primum non noccere) a work halfway between fiction and documentary, is, according to the leading French newspaper Le Monde, an exercise in introspection undertaken by Froehlich in relation to the theme of pain, the pain he feels as well as that inflicted upon the child in the course of surgery. He explains that his own awareness was long in coming, and reminds us that the newborn's ability to experience pain was not recognized until 1987. The novel begins with his daughter asking this question: "Have you ever hurt a child? Tell me you never hurt a child you were taking care of." Patrick Froehlich answered No, though "poorly articulated, scarcely audible," and he points out that "this inability to assert the contrary" concealed "a sense of shame" that he was forced to confront.