Body Farm 2 - Flesh And Bone (6 page)

“Um, an ax?” offered someone.

“Well, yes, but I was thinking of a wedge. When you apply pressure to a wedge, it tends to force things apart, doesn’t it? You see where the hip bone, or the ilium, joins the sacrum here on each side? That joint is called the sacroiliac joint. When you put pressure on this wedge, the sacrum—with the weight of your entire upper body—it pushes down, and it tends to force these hip bones apart, and strain that sacroiliac joint. That’s a common cause of lower-back pain in people my age and older.”

I looked directly at the intelligent-design proponent in the third row. “So you see,” I said, “there are all sorts of structural features in the human body that suggest slow, imperfect evolution, rather than instantaneous, intelligent design.”

He raised his hand, his face showing a mixture of regret and defiance. “But think about the eyeball, and the brain, and the heart. Those are complicated and amazing structures. The eyeball is a marvel of optical engineering. The brain is more sophisticated and powerful than any computer on earth. The heart makes any man-made pump look flimsy and crude.” I nodded, trying to acknowledge that we shared an admiration for those organs. “Besides,” he challenged, “what’s wrong with teaching both theories? Isn’t that what education is all about? Let both sides of the controversy make their case, and let people make up their own minds?”

“There is no controversy,” I thundered. “Evolution is no more controversial than the Copernican theory of the solar system, or the ‘theory’ that the Earth is round. Just because a few people make an opposing claim, loudly and often, that doesn’t make the issue a legitimate scientific controversy. There is nothing scientifically testable or provable about creation theory. Hard-core creationists claim the fossil record—fossilized evidence showing that animals and plants evolved over many millions of years—was created right alongside Adam and Eve. That’s hocus-pocus, a fictional geologic backstory, conjured up out of nothingness: ‘Fossilized remains just look millions of years old’—you said as much yourself not thirty minutes ago—‘because God made them look millions of years old.’ Logically, you can’t argue with that. It’s perfectly circular reasoning, the ultimate ‘because God said so.’ Only it’s not really God who’s saying so. It’s people claiming to speak for God. Well, maybe God spoke to me this morning as I was reading the paper, and told me to tell everyone that Charles Darwin was right, and that anybody who says otherwise just isn’t paying good attention.

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I’m not dismissing the possibility of some higher principle or higher power operating in the universe, something that’s far beyond my meager powers of comprehension. I can’t explain the ‘why’ of evolution, but the fact that I don’t fully understand how it works doesn’t keep it from working. I don’t begin to understand how pictures appear on my television screen, but that doesn’t keep them from showing up. And it doesn’t mean God put them there. The laws of physics—and people who are smarter about those laws than I am—put them there.

“And if we need any further proof of unintelligent design,” I said, really getting wound up, “all we need to do is look at the Kansas Board of Education. Those people are the very incarnation of dumb design.” I waved the morning newspaper.

My opponent was not ready to give up. “We are made in the image of God,” he insisted.

“Then God must be evolving, too,” I snapped. “And I hope he’s got some divine dentist up there in heaven to extract his wisdom teeth, because once they get impacted, God’s gonna have one hell of a toothache.” I wadded the newspaper into a ball.

I heard a gasp, and then a snicker, and the class jester called out, “Amen, brother!” And then someone at the back of the room began to clap. Slowly, steadily. Soon more of the students began to clap, and before long, almost all of them were clapping.

The young man in row three stood up. I opened my mouth to tell him to sit down, but then I noticed his face. It was a bright mottled red, and he looked on the verge of tears. He stared at me for a long moment, with eyes full of hurt and betrayal. Then he walked up the aisle and out of the lecture hall, accompanied by catcalls and whistles.

I gathered up my notes, the pelvis, and the crumpled newspaper, and exited by the lower door. As I traipsed down the sidewalk from McClung Museum to the underbelly of Neyland Stadium and the stairwell to my office and my collection of still-evolving skeletons, I accused myself of going too far, speaking too harshly, because I’d gone into class already mad about the newspaper article. It was important for scientists to defend good science and expose pseudoscience. But it was also important to do it gently, at least when students were involved. “Damn, Bill,” I said to myself, and at myself. “Damn.”

TESTIFYING AT A HEARING to revoke a physician’s medical license wasn’t exactly the same as testifying in court, but it was damn close. This hearing looked like a trial and it quacked like a trial, complete with lawyers and oaths to tell the truth.

The Tennessee Department of Health and Environment had a lawyer whose job was to ask me easy questions, and Dr. Garland Hamilton—the medical examiner whose license was on the chopping block, so to speak—had a lawyer whose job was to chip away at my answers.

The case that had prompted the state to try to revoke its own regional medical examiner’s license was a fascinating one. A man named Eddie Meacham called the 911 dispatcher in Knoxville one Saturday night to say that his friend had just collapsed. By the time the ambulance arrived, Billy Ray Ledbetter was dead, with a bloody wound in his lower back. Dr. Hamilton performed an autopsy, found copious amounts of blood in Ledbetter’s right lung, and pronounced the cause of death to be a stab wound in the lower back, with the blade penetrating the lower lobe of the right lung.

Trouble was, it turned out that the “stab wound” was inflicted by a big shard from a glass-topped coffee table, which Billy Ray had shattered when he collapsed onto it. I had the dubious plea sure of getting involved when I did an experiment at the Body Farm that showed it would have been impossible for a knife blade—even if there had been a knife wound, which there wasn’t—to puncture the back on the left side, cross the spine, and then veer ninety degrees into the right lung. The real cause of the lung hemorrhage, it turned out, was a bar fight a couple of weeks before Billy Ray’s death, when he got severely boot-stomped, breaking multiple ribs and puncturing the lung with a sharp piece of bone. My testimony had served the dual purpose of clearing Billy Ray’s friend of an unjustified murder charge—which pleased me—and of spotlighting Dr. Hamilton’s incompetence—which displeased me on two counts: first, that he was incompetent, and second, that I was now part of the effort to strip a longtime colleague of his license to practice medicine.

Hamilton had confronted me furiously after the trial, so I was prepared for the worst when I entered the hearing room. He stood up and stepped toward me; I braced for an assault, verbal or even physical. Instead, he stretched out his right hand. Startled, I took it and shook. “No hard feelings, Bill,” he said with a smile and a squeeze of my hand.

Surprised at his change of tone, all I could come up with was, “I hope not, Garland.”

Up at the front of the room, which was just a large conference room in one of the state office buildings in downtown Knoxville, a panel of three physicians—members of the Board of Medical Examiners—sat behind a long table. To one side, a stenographer perched at a much smaller table, her fingers poised over the odd little machine she used to transcribe words. I was fascinated by the technology. Her machine, a stenograph, looked more like an old-fashioned adding machine than a computer or typewriter; as she typed, though, she would often press two or three keys at once, like playing a chord on a piano. I had once asked a court reporter to explain and demonstrate the technique to me. “I’m transcribing sounds, not words,” she’d said, and she had me speak a few words at a time. She showed me what combinations of keys she used to transcribe the various sounds I had uttered—sometimes a “chord” represented a syllable; sometimes an entire word; in one case, even an entire phrase. It beat the hell out of anything I’d ever seen: as if she’d had to master a new language and a musical instrument all at the same time. Ever since, I’d had great admiration for court reporters’ abilities.

“Dr. Brockton, are you ready?” The state’s lawyer brought my mind back to the business at hand. He had already briefed me on the charge against Hamilton: “significant professional incompetence, with actual or risk of immediate harm,” the most serious charge possible. In this case, the harm was not to the patient, since Billy Ray was long since dead by the time Hamilton got to him; the harm was to the friend who faced life in prison for an unjust charge of murder. Pretty harmful, all right. If the examiners upheld the complaint, Hamilton’s license could just be suspended temporarily, but it was more likely to be revoked for good. And it would be good, judging by some other shoddy autopsy reports I’d seen.

I’d brought diagrams of the spine, rib cage, and lungs, showing the impossible “wound path” Hamilton had described the knife taking; I had also requested that a teaching skeleton be on hand so I could further illustrate the impossibility in three dimensions. The state’s lawyer led me swiftly through a recap of the experiment I’d done, in which I had been unable even to approximate the path Hamilton had described. He ended by having me describe finding the shard of bone, from Billy Ray’s own splintered ribs, that had pierced the right lung. The examiners on the panel asked a few questions: Might a thinner blade have been able to make the requisite turns? Was there any sign of a knife mark on the detached bone shard? Was there any possibility the shard had punctured the lung during postmortem handling of the body?—but they seemed satisfied with my answers.

Then Hamilton’s lawyer got his turn. I had been cross-examined by the Knox County district attorney about this same case, so I felt reasonably confident, well prepared, but his first question threw me off-balance. “Dr. Brockton, did you examine the decedent, Mr. Ledbetter, for evidence of scoliosis? Curvature of the spine?”

“Well, no,” I said, “but I think I would have noticed—”

“I’m not asking what you think you would have noticed, Doctor; I’m asking whether you took measurements or X-rays or conducted any other sort of investigation that would have yielded an objective indication of scoliosis?”

“Then I’d have to say no,” I said.

“And did you examine your research subject, the one you stabbed in the back, for evidence of scoliosis?”

I felt my cheeks flush. “No,” I said. “He appeared to be a normal individual. He was a marathon runner. I don’t imagine someone with scoliosis would have an easy time running marathons.”

“You ever see photos or news stories about amputees, wearing artificial limbs, running marathons?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you imagine they have an easy time doing it?”

“No, I don’t. I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at, though.”

“What I’m getting at, Dr. Brockton, is this: You don’t actually know for a fact that Billy Ray Ledbetter’s spine was normal, and you don’t know for a fact that your research subject’s spine was identical in shape to Mr. Ledbetter’s. What I’m getting at is the fact that a knife could have followed a different path in Mr. Ledbetter’s body than in the body of your experimental cadaver if their spines were curved differently. Couldn’t it, Dr. Brockton?”

I was not willing to back down completely. “Slightly,” I said. “If one of them had severe curvature and the other did not. But neither of them had severe curvature.”

“You’ve just said you didn’t measure or X-ray either spine for scoliosis,” he shot back.

“I haven’t measured or X-rayed your spine, either,” I said, “but that doesn’t keep me from noticing that you probably have some anterior deterioration and compression in your cervical disks. That’s why your head juts slightly forward of your shoulders. Do you have neck pain? You might be a good candidate for cervical fusion.”

“We are not here to talk about my spine, sir,” he all but shouted at me.

“No, sir, we’re not,” I said levelly. “What we’re here to talk about is truth and competence, and what I’m getting at is that after studying thousands of skeletons, I don’t have to take X-rays and measure angles to notice a deformed spine. Neither of these two individuals had a deformed spine.”

He sputtered a bit, and tried to regain his advantage, but he had clearly played his one trump card, and it wasn’t quite the ace he’d hoped it would be. After a little more sparring, the physician who was leading the hearing called a halt, thanked me, and pronounced me free to go.

As I left the hearing room, I noticed Hamilton’s attorney rubbing his neck; the sight made me smile. Then I caught the stenographer looking from me to the attorney and back again. She gave me a wink and a smile; she crossed her legs at the same time. I wasn’t sure if that was just a happy coincidence, or if it was some sort of reward for providing a bit of entertainment. Either way, I smiled bigger and returned the wink.

Then I saw Garland Hamilton looking at me. I met his gaze, and he gave me a brief nod. It wasn’t as friendly as his greeting had been, but it was fairly cordial, considering that his professional life was on the line here and I was part of the effort to terminate it.

The state’s lawyer led me out of the hearing room. In the marbled hallway, seated on a bench outside the double doors, was Jess Carter. If I’d given the matter any thought, I’d have realized Jess would be testifying as well, since she had reautopsied the body of Billy Ray Ledbetter before I examined the bones. But I’d been too preoccupied with the Chattanooga case, and with my heavy-handed treatment of my creationist student, to think about it.

“Hey, stranger,” she said. “Fancy seeing you here. You free by any chance to night?”

This was the second question today that had caught me off-balance.

“Well, I could be,” I said, my thoughts lagging half a beat behind my words. “I mean, I am. I think. Are you?”

She laughed at my clumsiness. “Ah. Sorry, no. Some guy in the hospital for routine foot surgery died the night he checked in, and the family’s screaming lawsuit. I gotta get back and do his autopsy this afternoon.”

“Oh. Right. Me too, now that I think about it. I mean, not an autopsy. I have some test papers to grade, so I can give them back tomorrow morning.”

“I thought UT was out on spring break this week?” She raised a quizzical eyebrow at me. Underneath both brows, her eyes were dancing.

Damn. Why did her processor always seem to work so much faster than mine? I was glad it hadn’t been Jess cross-examining me in there just now. “Don’t let me keep you from your testimony,” I said, nodding at the state’s attorney, who was looking anxious.

“Oh, what I have to say won’t take long,” she said. “I’ll just tell them how I took one look at those rotting remains and handed them straight over to the eminent Dr. Brockton.”

She winked, turned, and disappeared through the doorway. In her wake she left a swirl of hair, perfume, and female pheromones. Also an unmistakable aura of wit, intelligence, and professional competence.