In search of the soul

Originally published 23 January 1989

“I sing the body elec­tric,” wrote Walt Whit­man. Let the poets praise the body’s gal­van­ic spir­it, moral incan­des­cence, and cur­rents of courage and pas­sion. To physi­cian-essay­ists Richard Selz­er and Frank Gon­za­lez-Crus­si goes the task of chron­i­cling the body’s short cir­cuits, frayed insu­la­tion, blown fus­es, and dead batteries.

If you are squea­mish, per­haps you should stop read­ing now, because what fol­lows is not always pret­ty. Con­sid­er these chap­ter titles from Selz­er’s book Mor­tal Lessons: Bone, Liv­er, The Knife, Skin, The Bel­ly, The Corpse. Or these from Gon­za­lez-Crus­si’s Notes of an Anatomist: On Embalm­ing, Of The Dead as Liv­ing, Ter­a­tol­ogy (on mon­sters), Of Some Bod­i­ly Appendages. Oth­er books by both authors treat equal­ly unpleas­ant subjects.

Selz­er is a New Haven sur­geon. Gon­za­lez-Crus­si is a Chica­go pathol­o­gist. Both men are bril­liant writ­ers and schol­ars who probe for the human spir­it among the flayed organs and spilled blood of the oper­at­ing table and autop­sy slab.

It is, in Selz­er’s phrase, the “exact loca­tion of the soul” that they seek. For thou­sands of years the­olo­gians have sought to iden­ti­fy the organ of the body that is res­i­dence for our high­er nature. Is it the heart? The brain? Or — as the ancients claimed — the liver?

Med­i­cine is the off­shoot of reli­gion, and physi­cians still pur­sue the seat of our human­i­ty. But they are no longer so naive as to believe that the soul sits curled up in a cav­i­ty of the heart or a lobe of the liv­er, like a but­ter­fly in a chrysalis, await­ing rev­e­la­tion by the sur­geon’s knife. No, the soul must be dis­cerned in the total­i­ty of the body’s ani­mat­ed organs and their inter­ac­tion with the envi­ron­ment, and it is revealed not by the par­ings of a scalpel but by the writer’s art.

Encounter with a devil

To illus­trate the quest Selz­er tells the sto­ry of an anthro­pol­o­gist, recent­ly returned from the exca­va­tion of Mayan ruins in Guatemala, who appears at the infir­mary with an abscess on his upper arm. The sur­geon sets about enlarg­ing the open­ing, to allow bet­ter egress of the pus. And then…

“What hap­pen next is enough to lay Fran­cis Drake avom­it in his cab­in,” writes Selz­er. “No explor­er ever stared in wilder sur­mise than I into that crater from which there now emerges a nar­row gray head whose sole dis­tin­guish­ing fea­ture is a pair of black pin­cers. The head sits atop a longish flex­i­ble neck, arch­ing now this way, now that, test­ing the air. Alter­nate­ly it folds back upon itself, then advances in new bold­ness. And all the while, with dread­ful rhyth­mic­i­ty, the unspeak­able pin­cers open and close.”

In this hor­rif­ic encounter with a Mayan dev­il — the thumb-thick lar­va of a Cen­tral Amer­i­can bot­fly, emerg­ing from the body of its unwill­ing host — Selz­er the writer finds metaphors for ulti­mate evil, the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of the human frame, and the over-arch­ing hubris of the sur­geon. In the jaws of his hemo­stat he snares “the dark con­cen­trate itself,” and in the tri­par­tite ensem­ble of patient, bot­fly lar­va, and physi­cian per­ceives some­thing of the human soul.

The sur­geon’s knife cuts liv­ing flesh. The per­former of autop­sies, on the oth­er hand, sees only the body in death: Can such a mor­bid per­spec­tive — a rum­mag­ing with­in cadav­ers — illu­mi­nate life?

Pathol­o­gist Gon­za­lez-Crus­si con­fronts the ques­tion head on. As a per­former of autop­sies he moves among dis­eased organs, trau­ma, the wreck­age of senes­cence, and invi­able defor­ma­tions. “What in the name of heav­en,” he asks rhetor­i­cal­ly, “can be expect­ed of one who spends his life sur­round­ed by gloom and his work­ing day among tru­cu­lence, gore, and sadness?”

A revelation of sameness

It is a mea­sure of Gon­za­lez-Crus­si’s art as a writer that he with­draws from the gore of evis­cer­a­tion with a mea­sure of the soul. Not least among the lessons he draws from the cadav­er is an affir­ma­tion of the broth­er­hood of human­i­ty, tran­scend­ing race, gen­der, or oth­er exter­nal dif­fer­ences. He writes: “Left to abstrac­tions, our mind would fain seek refuge in philoso­phies that uphold our unique­ness, but the autop­sy, in a most bru­tal way, reveals our same­ness.” And the corpse teach­es the pathol­o­gist-writer some­thing about the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of life: “We should wish to take solace in thoughts that flat­ter our desire for per­ma­nence when the autop­sy drags us, by the hair, into the spec­ta­cle of our own dissolution.”

Lest these grim lessons seem less inspir­ing than those offered by poets, let it be said that Gon­za­lez-Crus­si’s essays are marked by a rev­er­ence for life and a sen­si­tiv­i­ty to human suf­fer­ing that I have sel­dom found among prac­ti­tion­ers of less mor­bid arts. If beau­ty is in the eye of the behold­er, then the humane pathol­o­gist is no less capa­ble than the poet of dis­cern­ing the human soul.

“Poet­ic flights are all par­don­able,” he writes, “but many are inac­cu­rate.” He sug­gests (right­ly, I think) that only sci­en­tif­ic dis­sec­tion of the human frame has the pow­er to ulti­mate­ly explain our emo­tion­al and rela­tion­al life. But do not mis­take this for a gross mate­ri­al­ism, any more than is Selz­er’s claim that flesh alone counts. If the human spir­it can be ful­ly exposed by dis­sec­tion of the body, then there is no need for the sur­geon or the pathol­o­gist to write.

So why does he write? Richard Selz­er answers: “It is to search for some mean­ing in the rit­u­al of surgery, which is at once mur­der­ous, painful, heal­ing, and full of love.” And what does he find among the blood and gore? “That man is not ugly, but that he is Beau­ty itself.”

Which sounds a lot like Whitman.