At the second appointment on 29 April, at 6.30 pm, in the municipal lounge, he will be a guest of the exhibition Il maggio dei libri 2024 – Città di Battipaglia, with What hope is made of – Bompiani. The presentation of the novel represents a precious opportunity to disseminate greater knowledge of the opportunities offered by Palliative Care in improving the quality of life of patients, treatment opportunities which are a right.
They will intervene
– Dr. De Martino Armando, palliative care specialist
– Dr. Giusi Acerra – palliative care specialist
– Dr. Giovanni D’Angelo – President of the Salerno Medical Association
The professor moderates. Francesco Manzo
With What Hope Is Made Of, @emmanuelexitu brings together all the ingredients that lead to the great novel. An extraordinary protagonist, a story that never gives up, and, above all, a living writing, capable of bearing witness to the most mysterious of virtues.” – Daniele Mencarelli
Emmanuel Exitu
At 5.46 in the morning on 15 October 1943, the final year student nurses of the Nightingale Training School for Nurses left London headed for a hospital set up to treat the wounded arriving from the war fronts. Among the girls, excited in their impeccable uniforms, there is one who is slim and funny due to her long legs and large feet: her family had directed her towards Oxford University, but she decided to become a nurse. Her name is Cicely Saunders. During the endless nights in the ward, Cicely sees beautiful and courageous boys, her peers, die in unspeakable suffering. She knows she cannot do anything for them except what the doctors prescribe, yet she realizes with horror that for a doctor every dying person is a lost cause, a professional failure. Cicely begins to do something to which she will dedicate her entire life: writing down the attempts and failures, the intuitions, the good practices that allow her to alleviate the suffering of those who are no longer curable. And when she realizes that her nursing diploma is no longer enough, she graduates in Medicine and, in 1967, manages to open the first modern hospice: not a place where one goes to die, but where one can live until the last moment with dignity. Emmanuel Exitu is inspired by the story of Cicely Saunders – whose procedures are still considered by the WHO to be the point of reference for improving the quality of life of terminally ill patients – to write a luminous novel, which tells of the mysterious embrace between pain and hope and it concerns us all. The story of this woman with visionary stubbornness tells us that suffering can be defeated first of all with a drug that we all have at our disposal, empathy, and that hope is, as Emily Dickinson wrote, “that feathered thing / that comes to rest on the soul” and can illuminate us until our last breath.
