Skin and Bones 5 comments

By A.G. Harmon

This entry is not for the squeamish, but the following lines are not gratuitous. It’s just that a recent encounter made me wonder what it is that makes people recoil in disgust, and whether you can be inoculated against such things.

The catalyst for my reflection occurred while I was cleaning out of a garage and suddenly came across a foot, and soon thereafter, a hip—a model of a foot, that is, and a model of a hip. My father was a surgeon, and drug reps used to come by his office and give him small plastic displays that could be taken apart, layer by layer, to reveal the inner workings of a particular body part. The purpose was to show patients, pre-op, what would be happening to them, so that they would be more comfortable with the surgical procedure.

When I was a boy, my father would give me these models—he was more partial to drawing pictures, he tells me. In consequence, I became a master at removing the epidermal cover, the subcutaneous layer, the muscular and vascular networks, and separating all the bones. I also enjoyed a multi-sheaved transparency we had, now lost, which displayed a man in profile. He could be skinned down to his skeleton, but I never found this layer as interesting as that of the organs, which was one sheet back, with its butterfly of lungs, snake of colon, pancake stack of stomach, liver, and spleen, and its tight little fist of a heart.

Supplementing this early anatomy lesson was a set of gray and black books that sat on the office shelves. Medical school texts, published in the 1950s, they contained pictures with the kind of frank graphics of the time, ones that made just looking at them seem forbidden, perhaps criminal—thus, the delight in doing so. Skin diseases of every nature, lesions and fatty tumors, mangled limbs and infected wounds, the whole business was an exercise in explicitness, reinforced by very matter-of-fact captions meant to teach rather than exploit.

Adding to the unintended luridness, all of the patients in the pictures had their eyes blacked out by a little rectangular box. When left alone in the office, I worked my way through these books, picture by picture, like a child sticking his head under the curtain of a freak show.

Now I see that the models and the textbooks prepared me quite well for what would come later—trips to the emergency room. For in those days, when times were less rule-bound, I would often accompany my father when he was called out to the hospital.

Standing in a corner—cautioned to be quiet, stay out of the way, and say yes ma’am and no ma’am if the nurses asked me questions—I saw many things, like a farmer who’d cut his finger off in a hay elevator, the stump spurting blood like a tiny red fountain; and a man who’d been stabbed in the back at a nightclub, his lung collapsing all the while. Nobody was knocked out, so the pain the patients felt was on full display.

But I don’t remember anybody ever preparing me for what I was about to see, nor of their talking about it to me afterward. I don’t even remember thinking about it much. I was more taken with the gauze sponges and tongue depressers I was given as souvenirs. Years later, when a med student friend tried to scare me with a trip to the dissection morgue at midnight, I proved a big disappointment. The leathery corpses he brought up from the formaldehyde were only a curiosity, not a horror.

The more I think about it, these things account for my strong stomach when it comes to blood, along with growing up on a stock farm, where dead animals were common, and growing up hunting game, where dead animals were the point. We cleaned and dressed them too, which also could have contributed to my constitution.

Of course, my acquaintanceship with all this may be peculiar to the way I was brought up, which is more like the way my father and the generations before him grew up. Surely, in the past most people had to live on close terms with the grisly side of life; after all, if you wanted chicken for dinner, you had to wring its neck. But today, people in certain professions—doctors, obviously, but also policemen and firemen and undertakers, etc.—still have to gain a certain sang-froid about such matters.

Which brings me to my point: is the common revulsion at these things due to empathy with the pain felt, or to compassion with the anguish suffered? I hope I’m as compassionate as the next person, and I certainly believe those in the previously named professions are, or at least can be.

So I don’t think it’s a matter of compassion. Then is it indeed a matter of pain? An ability to dissociate or objectify the phenomenon without personalizing or imagining it sensually?

While I don’t count myself among this group, having been close to someone who really was only provokes the question of what such intimacy with the human clockwork provides by way of perspective.

I can only guess at the answer: perhaps some untranslatable awareness of a creature’s frailty, and also of its resilience—of how very much there is to be afraid of in life, and of how very little—and of how the mortal coil through which we strut and fret our hour upon the stage—however well, however badly—is in the end irreducible to what all the models show, and to what all the texts say.