Letters to a Young Doctor by Richard Selzer

Author:Richard Selzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Letter to a Young Surgeon V

IN THE MOMENTS BEFORE SURGERY, look, if you will, at the tray upon which the instruments lie. There is a certain restlessness among the hemostats and forceps. Do you detect it? A cabin fever, like the eagerness of hounds wanting to be set free in the woods. Even surgeons who have never learned the knack of loving people will love these simple, hard, shiny tools, knowing that they will not betray him.

Surgical instruments, like the brush and palette knife of the artist, possess a mystic anonymity. It is only when they are taken into the hand and guided that they become identifiable as tools or implements. A knife is but a knife until it becomes a scalpel. Only then is it exalted. What a far cry these glittering tools from the fleams and stylets of ancient man, yet no more beautiful for all their complexity. The man who took up the splintered thighbone of a gelded lamb in order to couch the cataract of his tribes fellow was no less a surgeon than the man who squeezes the trigger of a laser gun.

We are too removed from our tools. It is a kind of betrayal of our craft. Because we do not make our instruments with our own hands, we do not use them to best advantage. Our relationship to our instruments is a more distant and formal one than were it still necessary to chisel the nib of a knife from a stone or sharpen a goose quill into a probe. A great oboist cuts and ties his own reeds. So does the fisherman his trout flies. In so doing these men infuse them with their spirit. If the gift of prophecy has not deserted me, I should say that such men will make sweeter music and catch bigger fish than those who place their craft in the hands of manufacturers. There is something soulless about a steel blade that is punched out identical to all others by a machine, is used one time and then discarded.

An ancient tradition commands that on the night prior to a single combat that is to decide the fate of an empire, or on the eve of one’s coronation, one must perform certain rites so as to be in a condition of greatest strength and purity. To do so is but to show reverence for the task ahead. Cleansing of the spirit is achieved through prayer and meditation; cleansing of the body, through bathing, fasting and abstinence from sex. It does not seem to me overly harsh to require of a man who will be crowned king in the morning that he absent himself from palatine and penile felicity on the night before. One’s coronation is not, after all, a Monday, Wednesday and Friday affair. But were we who practice surgery to so deprive ourselves on every operation eve, I very much fear that no patient would be safe from our blood lust!

It is at least as ancient

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