Memoirs of a Physician (40 page)
Dame Grivette bustled about the room as if in search of something, but did not reply.
” You have no occasion for a watch, sir, to go to the amphitheater and the hospital ; it will perhaps not be easily found, and that would cause some delay.”
” But, sir, I attach great value to my watch, which is an excellent one, and which I bought with my savings.” ‘
” In your absence, Dame Grivette will look for it,” replied Balsamo, with a smile ; ” and if she searches carefully, it will be found when you return.”
” Oh, certainly,” said Dame Grivette, ” it will be found, unless monsieur has left it somewhere else. Nothing is lost here.”
” You see,” said Balsamo. ” Come, sir, come ! “
Marat did not venture to persist, and followed Balsamo, grumbling.
When they reached the door, Balsamo said:
“Where shall we go first?”
” To the lecture-room, if you please, master ; I had marked a subject which must have died last night of acute meningitis. I want to make some observations on the brain, and I do not wish my colleagues to take it from me.”
” Then let us go to the amphitheater, Monsieur Marat.”
” Moreover, it is only a few yards from here ; the amphitheater is close to the hospital, and I shall only have to go in for a moment; you may even wait for me at the door.”
” On the contrary, I wish to accompany you inside, and hear your opinion of this subject.”
” When it was alive, sir ? “
” No ; since it has become a corpse.”
” Take care,” said Marat, smiling ; ” I may gain a point over you, for I am well acquainted with this part of my profession, and am said to be a skilful anatomist.”
” Pride ! pride ! ever pride ! ” murmured Balsamo.
” What do you say ? ” asked Marat.
” I say that we shall see, sir,” replied Balsamo. ” Let us enter.”
Marat preceded Balsamo in the narrow alley leading to
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the amphitheater, which was situated at the extremity of the Kue Hautefeuille. Balsamo followed him unhesitatingly until they reached a long, narrow room, where two corpses, a male and a female, lay stretched upon a marble table.
The woman had died young ; the man was old and bald. A soiled sheet was thrown over their bodies, leaving their faces half uncovered.
They were lying side by side upon this cold bed; they who had perhaps never met before in the world, and whose souls, then voyaging in eternity, must, could they have looked down on earth, have been struck with wonderment at the proximity of their mortal remains.
Marat, with a single movement, raised and threw aside the coarse linen which covered the two bodies, whom death had thus made equal before the anatomist’s scalpel.
” Is not the sight of the dead repugnant to your feelings?” asked Marat, in his usual boasting manner.
” It makes me sad,” replied Balsamo.
” Want of custom,” said Marat. ” I who see this sight daily, feel neither sadness nor disgust. We practitioners live with the dead, and do not interrupt any of the functions of our existence on their account.”
” It is a sad privilege of your profession, sir.”
” Besides,” added Marat, ” why should I be sad, or feel disgust? In the first case, reflection forbids it; in the second, custom.”
” Explain your ideas,” said Balsamo ; ” I do not understand you clearly. Reflection first.”
” Well, why should I be afraid ? Why should I fear an inert mass a statue of flesh instead of stone, marble, or granite ? “
” In short a you think there is nothing in a corpse.”
” Nothing absolutely nothing.”’
” Do you believe that ? “
” I am sure of it.”
” But in the living body ? “
” There is motion,” said Marat, proudly.
“And the soul? you do not speak of it, sir.”
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” I have never fcrand it in the bodies which I have dissected.”
“Because you have only dissected corpses.”
” Oh, no, sir ; I have frequently operated upon living bodies.”
” And you have found nothing more in them than in the corpses ? “
” Yes, I have found pain. Do you call pain the soul ? “
” Then you do not believe in it ? “
” In what ? “
” In the soul.”
” I believe in it, because I am at liberty to call it mo-tion if I wish.”
” That is well. You believe in the soul ; that is all I asked. I am glad you believe in it.”
” One moment, master ; let us understand each other, and, above all, let us not exaggerate,” said Marat, with his serpent smile. ” We practitioners are rather disposed to materialism.”
” These bodies are very cold,” said Balsamo, dreamily, ” and .this woman was very beautiful.”
” Why, yes.”
” A lovely soul would have been suitable in this lovely body.”
” Ah ! there is the mistake in Him who created her. A beautiful scabbard, but a vile sword. This corpse, master, is that of a wretched woman who had just left St. Lazarus, when she died of cerebral inflammation in the Hotel Dieu. Her history is long, and tolerably scandalous. If you call the motive power which impelled this creature, soul, you wrong our souls, which must be of the same essence, since they are derived from the same source.”
” Her soul should have been cured,” said Balsamo ; ” it was lost for want of the only Physician who is indispensable the Physician of the Soul.”
” Alas ! master, that is another of your theories. Medicine is only for the body,” replied Marat, with a bitter smile. ” Now you have a word on your lips which Moliere has often employed in his comedies, and it is this word which makes you smile.”
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” Xo,” said Balsamo ; ” you mistake ; you cannot guess why I smile. What we concluded just now was, that these corpses are void, was it not ? “
” And insensible ” added Marat, raising the young wo-man’s head, and letting it fall noisily upon the marble, while the body neither moved nor shuddered.
“Very well,” said Balsamo, “let us now go to the hospital.”
” Wait one moment, master, I entreat you, until I have separated from the trunk this head, which I am most anxious to have, as it was the seat of a very curious disease. Will you allow me ? “
” Do you ask ? ” said Balsamo.
Marat opened his case, and took from it a bistoury, and picked up in the corner a large wooden mallet stained with blood. Then, with a practised hand, he made a circular incision, which separated all the flesh and the muscles of the neck, and having thus reached the bone, he slipped his bistoury between the juncture of the vertebral column, and struck a sharp blow upon it with the mallet.
The head rolled upon the table, and from the table upon the floor ; Marat was obliged to seize it with his damp hands. Balsamo turned away, not to give too much joy to the triumphant operator.
” One day,” said Marat, who thought he had hit the master in a weak point, ” one day some philanthropist will occupy himself with the details of death as others do of life, and will invent a machine which shall sever a head at a single blow, and cause instantaneous annihilation, which no other instrument of death does. The wheel, quartering, and hanging are punishments suitable for savages, but not for civilized people. An enlightened nation, as France is, should punish, but not revenge. Those who condemn to the wheel, who hang or quarter, revenge themselves upon the criminal by inflicting pain before punishing him by death, which, in my opinion, is too much by half.”
” And in mine also, sir. But what kind of an instrument do you mean ? “
” I can fancy a machine cold and impassible as the law itself. The man who is charged with fulfilling the last of-
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fice is moved at the sight of his fellowman, and sometimes strikes badly, as it happened to the Duke o fMonmouth and to Chalais. This could not be the case with a machine with two arms of oak wielding a cutlass, for instance.”
” And do you believe, sir, that because the knife would pass with the rapidity of lightning between the base of the occiput and the trapezoid muscles, that death would be instantaneous, and the pain momentary ? “
” Certainly ; death would be instantaneous, lor the iron would sever at a blow the nerves which cause motion. The pain would be momentary, for the blade would separate the brain, which is the seat of the feelings, from the heart, which is the center of life.”
” Sir,” said Balsamo, ” the punishment of decapitation exists in Germany.”
” Yes, but by the sword ; and, as I said before, a man’s hand may tremble.”
” Such a machine exists in Italy ; an arm of oak wields it. It is called the mannaja.”
“Well?”
” Well, sir, I have seen criminals, decapitated by the executioner, raise their headless bodies from the bench on which they were seated, and stagger five or six paces off, where they fell. I have picked up heads which had rolled to the foot of the mannaja, as that head you are holding by the hair has just rolled from the marble table, and on pronouncing in their ears the name by which those persons had been called, I have seen the eyes open again and turn in their orbit, in their endeavors to see who had called them back again to earth.”
” A nervous movement nothing else.”
” Are the nerves not the organs of sensibility ? “
” What do you conclude from that, sir ? “
” I conclude that it would be better, instead of inventing a machine which kills to punish, that man shoiild seek a means of punishing without killing. The society which will invent this means, will assuredly be the best and the most enlightened of societies.”
” Utopias again ! always Utopias ! ” said Marat.
“Perhaps von are right,” said Balsamo; “time will
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show. But did you not speak of the hospital? Let us go!”
” Come, then ‘ said Marat ; and he tied the woman’s head in his pocket-handkerchief, carefully knotting the four corners. ” Xow I am sure, at least,” said he, as he left the hall, ” that my comrades will only have my leav-ings.”
They took the way to the Hotel Dieu the dreamer and the practician, side by side.
” You have cut off this head very coolly and skilfully, sir,” said Balsamo ; ” do you feel less emotion when you operate upon the living than the dead? Does the sight of suffering affect you more than that of immobility? Have you more pity for living bodies than for corpses ? “
” Xo ; that would be as great a fault as for the executioner to be moved. You may kill a man by cutting his thigh unskilfully, just as well as by severing the head from the body. A good surgeon operates with his hand, not with his heart; though he knows well, at the same time, in his heart, that for one moment of suffering he gives years of life and health. That is the fair side of our profession, master.”
” Yes, sir ; but in the living bodies you meet with the soul, I hope.”
” Yes, if you will agree with me that the soul is motion, or sensibility. Yes, certainly, I meet with it; and it is very troublesome, too; for it kills far more patients than any scalpel.”
They had by this time arrived at the threshold of the Hotel Dieu, and now entered the hospital. Guided by Marat, who still carried his ominous burden, Balsamo penetrated to the hall where the operations were performed, in which the head-surgeon and the students in surgery were assembled. The attendant had just brought in a young man who had been run over the preceding week by a heavy carriage, the wheel of which had crushed his foot. A hasty operation, performed upon the limb when benumbed by pain, had not been sufficient ; the inflammation had rapidly extended, and the amputation of the leg had now become urgent.
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The unfortunate man, stretched upon his bed of anguish, looked with a horror which would have melted tigers, at the band of eager students who were watching for the mo-ment of his martyrdom, perhaps of his death, that they might study the science of life that marvelous phenomenon behind which lies the gloomy phenomenon of death.
He seemed to implore a pitying look, a smile, or a word of encouragement from each of the students and attendants, but the beatings of his heart were responded to only by indifference, his beseeching looks with glances of iron. A surviving emotion of pride kept him silent. He reserved all his strength for the cries which pain would soon wring from him. But when he felt the heavy hand of the attendant upon his shoulder, when the arms of the assistants twined around him like the serpents of Laocoon, when he heard the operator’s voice cry, ” Courage ! ” the unfortunate man ventured to break the silence, and asked, in a plaintive voice:
” Shall I suffer much ? “
” Oh, no ; make your mind easy,” replied Marat, with a hypocritical smile, which was affectionate to the patient but ironical to Balsamo.
Marat saw that Balsamo had understood him; he approached and whispered:
” It is a dreadful operation. The bone is full of cracks and fearfully sensitive. He will die, not of the wound, but of the pain. That is what the soul does for this poor man ‘
” Then why do you operate ? why do you not let him die in peace ? “
“Because it is the surgeon’s duty to attempt a cure, even when the cure seems impossible.”
” And you say he will suffer ? “
” Fearfully.”
” And that his soul is the cause ? “
” His soul, which has too much sympathy with the body.”
” Then, why not operate upon the soul ? Perhaps the tranquillity of the one would cause the cure of the other.”
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” I have done so,” said Marat, while the attendants continued to bind the patient.
” You have prepared his soul ? “
” Yes.”
“How so?”
” As one always does, by words. I spoke to his soul, his intelligence, his sensibility to that organ which caused the Greek philosopher to exclaim, ‘ Pain, thou art no evil’ the language suitable for it. I said to him, ‘ You will not suffer.’ That is the only remedy hitherto known, as regards the soul falsehood ! Why is this she-devil of a soul connected with the body ? When I cut off this head just now, the body said nothing, yet the operation was a serious one. But motion had ceased, sensibility was extinguished, the soul had fled, as you spiritual-ists say.. This is the reason why the head I severed said nothing, why the body which I mutilated allowed me to do so; while this body which is yet inhabited by a soul for a short time, indeed, but still inhabited will cry out fearfully. Stop your ears well, master, you who are moved by this union of body and soul, which will always destroy your theory until you succeed in isolating the body from the soul.”
