We take a break from the usual medical news to point you to this beautiful essay “The Knife” by Richard Selzer.
Here’s an excerpt:
There is sound, the tight click of clamps fixing teeth into severed blood vessels, the snuffle and gargle of the suction machine clearing the field of blood for the next stroke, the litany of monosyllables with which one prays his way down and in: clamp, sponge, suture, tie, cut. And there is color. The green of the cloth, the white of the sponges, the red and yellow of the body. Beneath the fat lies the fascia, the tough fibrous sheet encasing the muscles. It must be sliced and the red beef of the muscles separated. Now there are retractors to hold apart the wound. Hands move together, part, weave. We are fully engaged, like children absorbed in a game or the craftsmen of some place like Damascus.
Who says surgeons can’t be poets? I wish I could write like that!
(spotted in Twitter; more on Richard Selzer in Wikipedia)
from the Malaysian Medical Resources
Reading of the week: The Knife
