Travels Read Free Page A

orbit.”
    “Right.”
    It was a great feeling.
    Then he said, “How about this?” A small, hook-shaped thing near the middle of the skull.
    That was easy. “The sella turcica.”
    “Containing?”
    “The pituitary.”
    “What is just lateral to it?”
    “The cavernous sinus.”
    “Containing?”
    I rattled it off: “The curving internal carotid artery, and the ocular nerves, three, four, and six, and two branches of the trigeminal nerve, the ophthalmic and the maxillary.”
    “And this dark space, just below?”
    “The sphenoid sinus.”
    “And why is it dark?”
    “Because it contains air.”
    “Right. Now then, Dr. Martin …” And he turned to another member of the group.
    I thought, I’m getting it. I’m finally beginning to get it. I was excited. But at the same time, the pressure was building. Every day, building.
    The jokes got worse. One guy wrote “Al’s Body Shop” on the back of his anatomy lab coat. And the cadavers began getting names: The Jolly Green Giant, The Thin Man, King Kong.
    Ours had a name, too: Lady Brett.
    After two months, on a day when the instructors were out of the room, several people played football with a liver. “He’s going out, he’s deep in the end zone, the ball is in the air … and … touchdown!” The liver flew through the air.
    A few students pretended to be horrified, but nobody really was. We had by now dissected the legs, and the feet had been unwrapped; we had dissected the arms, the hands, and abdomen. We could see that this was a human body, a dead person laid out on the table before us. We were continuously reminded of what we were doing—we could see the form clearly. There was no way to get the necessary distance, to detach, except to be outrageous and disrespectful. There was no way to survive except to laugh.
    There were certain jobs in the dissection that nobody wanted to do. Nobody wanted to cut the pelvis in half. Nobody wanted to dissect the face. Nobody wanted to inflate the eyeballs with a syringe. We portioned out these jobs, argued over them.
    I managed to avoid each of these jobs.
    “Okay, Crichton, but then you have to section the head.”
    “Okay.”
    “You remember, now.…”
    “Yeah, yeah, I’ll remember.”
    The head was in the future. I’d worry about it when I got there.
    * * *
    But the day finally came. They handed me the hacksaw. I realized I had made a terrible bargain. I had waited, and now I was stuck with the most overt mutilation of all, to divide the head along the midsagittal plane, to cut it in half like a melon so we could see inside, inspect the cavities, the sinuses, the passages, the vessels.
    The eyes were inflated, staring at me as I cut. We had dissected the muscles around the eyes, so I couldn’t close them. I just had to go through with it, and try to do it correctly.
    Somewhere inside me, there was a kind of click, a shutting off, a refusal to acknowledge, in ordinary human terms, what I was doing. After that click, I was all right. I cut well. Mine was the best section in the class. People came around to admire the job I had done, because I had stayed exactly in the midline and all the sinuses were beautifully revealed.
    I later learned that this shutting-off click was essential to becoming a doctor. You could not function if you were overwhelmed by what was happening. In fact, I was all too easily overwhelmed. I tended to faint—when I saw accident victims in the emergency ward, during surgery, or while drawing blood. I had to find a way to guard against what I felt.
    And still later I learned that the best doctors found a middle position where they were neither overwhelmed by their feelings nor estranged from them. That was the most difficult position of all, and the precise balance—neither too detached nor too caring—was something few learned.
    At the time I resented the fact that our education seemed to be as much about emotions as about the factual content of what we were learning. This