Anatomy Lesson, The by Roth Philip

Author:Roth, Philip [Roth, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Modern Classics, Novel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1983-01-01T02:00:00+00:00

4 Burning

A double vodka on takeoff, then over some waterway in Pennsylvania three drags on a joint in the airplane toilet, and Zuckerman was managing well enough. Not much more pain than he would have felt at home doing nothing but tending pain. And every time his determination began to crumble and he told himself that he was running away on a ridiculous impulse, running away to nothing that made sense or promised relief, running away from what it was impossible to escape, he opened the medical-school catalogue and reread the chart on page 42 that laid out the daily course load for a medical student’s first year.

You start at eight-thirty, five mornings a week, with Biology 310/311. From nine-thirty to noon, Clinics 300 and 390. An hour for lunch, and from one to five every afternoon, Anatomy 301. Then the evening’s homework. Days and nights, filled not by him with what little he knew but by them with all he didn’t. He turned to the description of Clinics 390.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PATIENT. This course is offered in the first year of training … Each student will interview a patient before the group, focusing on the present complaint, the illness onset, reaction to the illness and hospitalization, life changes related, personality characteristics, coping styles, etc.…

Sounds familiar. Sounds like the art of fiction, except that the coping style and the personality characteristics belong to a patient in off the street. Other people. Somebody should have told me about them a long time ago.

360. FETAL-MATERNAL MEDICINE. The student will work full-time in the labor-delivery floor. He will be required to review the bibliography related to methods and techniques of recording maternal and fetal physiologic parameters during labor and delivery …

361. OBSTETRICS: BIRTH ROOMS. This elective will primarily encompass inpatient obstetrics, especially birth-room experience. Some continuity of care can be achieved by postpartum follow-up on selected patients …

Not until Michigan did Zuckerman discover that if you take obstetrics as your specialty you specialize in gynecology too. Tumor formations. Infected reproductive organs. Well, it’d bestow a new perspective on an old obsession. What’s more, he owed it to women after Carnovsky. From what he’d read of the reviews in the feminist press, he could expect a picture of himself up in the post office, alongside the mug shot of the Marquis de Sade, once the militants took Washington and began guillotining the thousand top misogynists in the arts. He came off no better there than with the disapproving Jews. Worse. They had put him on the cover of one of their magazines. WHY DOES THIS MAN HATE WOMEN? Those girls meant business—wanted blood. Well, he’d turn the tables and tend to abnormalities in the discharge of theirs. Relieving menstrual disorders beats he said she said I said you said on anyone’s scale of values. In memory of the mother to whom he’d intended no harm. In the name of ex-wives who had done their damnedest. For his ministering harem. Where I have fornicated, there shall I diagnose, prescribe, operate, and cure.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.