Thoughts in my Hands

-------“All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river”

Perhaps one of the most thought provoking people that ever lived wrote these words in a short essay many years ago shortly after he became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River and learned to successfully navigate the “majestic river.” Mark Twain felt that by discovering the secrets of the river, the river lost is beauty, its charm and its once overwhelming majesty. A mesmerizing ripple in the water in the shipping channel lost its allure, because now he knew that that ripple was there because there was something just under the surface just waiting for some unsuspecting pilot to wreck his steamboat upon it. His beautiful sunset fades into a warning of wind tomorrow; a lone floating log evolves into a perilous sign that the river is rising. He relates these strong feelings toward doctors and their patients. Twain feels sorrow for them because they may no longer see a “lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek”; it is now only “a ‘break’ that ripples above some deadly disease”. He wonders if the physicians fail to see the beauty of their patients, as they read their bodies and symptoms, much as he fails to see the beauty of the river. He wonders if they feel sorrow for themselves for losing their vision and forgetting why they began to practice medicine in the first place. Much like Twain’s love of the river, their study of medicine stemmed from their love of the human body and all of its mysteries. It is a fantastic read, look it up and give it a try: “Reading a River”

So how does this relate…

I pulled the brain out of my cadaver today, someone’s daughter, wife, mother, grandmother, great grandmother. All of her emotions, memories, personality, her ability to speak, to walk, to carry on a conversation with her children, to laugh and cry, to tell stories and listen to stories was all reduced to a highly organized mass of tissue, vessels, and nerves all resting in my hands. I will have to say that it was a little overwhelming to think that what I held in my hands was the center of a human once going about their daily life, going to buy groceries or watching a beautiful sunset.

I just spent 5 hours in the dissection lab trying to figure out how it all worked, and I still think we are amazing. There are many, many secrets still left to be discovered…..