Mortal Lessons: Notes On The Art Of Surgery: Notes on the Art of Surgery – A Classic―Moving and Funny Essays on Life, Death, and the Human Condition (Harvest Book) - Softcover

Selzer, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156004003 ISBN 13: 9780156004008

Verlag: Harcourt Brace, 1996

Inhaltsangabe

In this collection of nineteen unforgettable essays, Dr. Selzer describes unsparingly the surgeon’s art. Both moving and perversely funny, Mortal Lessons is an established classic that considers not only the workings and misworkings of the human body but also the meaning of life and death. With a Preface written by the Author especially for this edition.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Selzer (1928–2016) was for many years a surgeon practicing in New Haven, Connecticut, where he was also on the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine. He was born in Troy, New York, was graduated from Union College and Albany Medical College, and from the Surgical Training Program of Yale University. In 1975 he won the National Magazine Award for his essays on medicine. Dr. Selzer’s books include Letters to a Young Doctor, Mortal Lessons, Down from Troy, Imagine a Woman and Other Tales, and Raising the Dead.

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In this collection of nineteen unforgettable essays, Dr. Richard Selzer describes unsparingly the surgeon's art, opening up the body to view, one part at a time. Both moving and perversely funny, Mortal Lessons is an established classic that considers not only the workings and misworkings of the human body, but also the meaning of life and death. And although Dr. Selzer's dark humor makes the burgeoning tumors and ulcerations of his essays more bearable, he is frank about the mysterious and dreaded inevitable - the sometime surprise, as he calls it, at the center of surgery: death. Behind his traditional "surgeon's arrogance" the reader will find endearing self-mockery, a very real empathy for his patients, and the ready suggestion that even the surgeon is still very small when he stands before nature.

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Mortal Lessons

Notes On The Art Of Surgery

By Richard Selzer

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Copyright © 1987 Richard Selzer
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-15-600400-8

Contents

Title Page, 
Table of Contents, 
Frontispiece, 
Dedication, 
Copyright, 
Preface, 
I. THE ART OF SURGERY, 
THE EXACT LOCATION OF THE SOUL, 
THE SURGEON AS PRIEST, 
LESSONS FROM THE ART, 
II. THE BODY, 
BONE, 
LIVER, 
STONE, 
THE KNIFE, 
SKIN, 
THE BELLY, 
THE CORPSE, 
III. ESSAYS, 
BALD!, 
SMOKING, 
ABORTION, 
THE TWELVE SPHERES, 
IV. DOWN FROM TROY, 
DOWN FROM TROY, 
CAR SICKNESS, 
LONGFELLOW, VIRGIL, AND ME, 
JACOB STREET, 
BIRDWATCHING, 
Picture Credits, 
Acknowledgments, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

THE ART OF SURGERY

THE EXACT LOCATION OF THE SOUL

Someone asked me why a surgeon would write. Why, when the shelves are already too full? They sag under the deadweight of books. To add a single adverb is to risk exceeding the strength of the boards. A surgeon should abstain. A surgeon, whose fingers are more at home in the steamy gullies of the body than they are tapping the dry keys of a typewriter. A surgeon, who feels the slow slide of intestines against the back of his hand and is no more alarmed than were a family of snakes taking their comfort from such an indolent rubbing. A surgeon, who palms the human heart as though it were some captured bird.

Why should he write? Is it vanity that urges him? There is glory enough in the knife. Is it for money? One can make too much money. No. It is to search for some meaning in the ritual of surgery, which is at once murderous, painful, healing, and full of love. It is a devilish hard thing to transmit — to find, even. Perhaps if one were to cut out a heart, a lobe of the liver, a single convolution of the brain, and paste it to a page, it would speak with more eloquence than all the words of Balzac. Such a piece would need no literary style, no mass of erudition or history, but in its very shape and feel would tell all the frailty and strength, the despair and nobility of man. What? Publish a heart? A little piece of bone? Preposterous. Still I fear that is what it may require to reveal the truth that lies hidden in the body. Not all the undressings of Rabelais, Chekhov, or even William Carlos Williams have wrested it free, although God knows each one of those doctors made a heroic assault upon it.

I have come to believe that it is the flesh alone that counts. The rest is that with which we distract ourselves when we are not hungry or cold, in pain or ecstasy. In the recesses of the body I search for the philosophers' stone. I know it is there, hidden in the deepest, dampest cul-de-sac. It awaits discovery. To find it would be like the harnessing of fire. It would illuminate the world. Such a quest is not without pain. Who can gaze on so much misery and feel no hurt? Emerson has written that the poet is the only true doctor. I believe him, for the poet, lacking the impediment of speech with which the rest of us are afflicted, gazes, records, diagnoses, and prophesies.

I invited a young diabetic woman to the operating room to amputate her leg. She could not see the great shaggy black ulcer upon her foot and ankle that threatened to encroach upon the rest of her body, for she was blind as well. There upon her foot was a Mississippi Delta brimming with corruption, sending its raw tributaries down between her toes. Gone were all the little web spaces that when fresh and whole are such a delight to loving men. She could not see her wound, but she could feel it. There is no pain like that of the bloodless limb turned rotten and festering. There is neither unguent nor anodyne to kill such a pain yet leave intact the body.

For over a year I trimmed away the putrid flesh, cleansed, anointed, and dressed the foot, staving off, delaying. Three times each week, in her darkness, she sat upon my table, rocking back and forth, holding her extended leg by the thigh, gripping it as though it were a rocket that must be steadied lest it explode and scatter her toes about the room. And I would cut away a bit here, a bit there, of the swollen blue leather that was her tissue.

At last we gave up, she and I. We could no longer run ahead of the gangrene. We had not the legs for it. There must be an amputation in order that she might live — and I as well. It was to heal us both that I must take up knife and saw, and cut the leg off. And when I could feel it drop from her body to the table, see the blessed space appear between her and that leg, I too would be well.

Now it is the day of the operation. I stand by while the anesthetist administers the drugs, watch as the tense familiar body relaxes into narcosis. I turn then to uncover the leg. There, upon her kneecap, she has drawn, blindly, upside down for me to see, a face; just a circle with two ears, two eyes, a nose, and a smiling upturned mouth. Under it she has printed SMILE, DOCTOR. Minutes later I listen to the sound of the saw, until a little crack at the end tells me it is done.

So, I have learned that man is not ugly, but that he is Beauty itself. There is no other his equal. Are we not all dying, none faster or more slowly than any other? I have become receptive to the possibilities of love (for it is love, this thing that happens in the operating room), and each day I wait, trembling in the busy air. Perhaps today it will come. Perhaps today I will find it, take part in it, this love that blooms in the stoniest desert.

All through literature the doctor is portrayed as a figure of fun. Shaw was splenetic about him; Moliere delighted in pricking his pompous medicine men, and well they deserved it. The doctor is ripe for caricature. But I believe that the truly great writing about doctors has not yet been done. I think it must be done by a doctor, one who is through with the love affair with his technique, who recognizes that he has played Narcissus, raining kisses on a mirror, and who now, out of the impacted masses of his guilt, has expanded into self-doubt, and finally into the high state of wonderment. Perhaps he will be a nonbeliever who, after a lifetime of grand gestures and mighty deeds, comes upon the knowledge that he has done no more than meddle in the lives of his fellows, and that he has done at least as much harm as good. Yet he may continue to pretend, at least, that there is nothing to fear, that death will not come, so long as people depend on his authority. Later, after his patients have left, he may closet himself in his darkened office, sweating and afraid.

There is a story by Unamuno in which a priest, living in a small Spanish village, is adored by all the people for his piety, kindness, and the majesty with which he celebrates the Mass each Sunday. To them he is already a saint. It is a foregone conclusion, and they speak of him as Saint Immanuel. He helps them with their plowing and planting, tends them when they are sick, confesses them, comforts them in death, and every Sunday, in his rich, thrilling voice, transports them to paradise with his chanting. The fact is that Don Immanuel is not so much a saint as a martyr. Long ago his own faith left him. He is an atheist, a good man doomed to suffer the life of a hypocrite, pretending to a faith he does not have. As he raises the chalice of wine, his hands tremble, and a cold sweat pours from him. He cannot stop for he knows that the people...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Harcourt Brace
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1996
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0156004003
• ISBN 13: 9780156004008
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: HarperCollins Publishers, Product Safety Manager; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; HarperCollins, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland