At this Pearson took a deep draw on his cigar, and Seddons, knowing what was coming, moved nearer. He himself might be only a bit player in this scene, but he had no intention of missing a cue. As Pearson exhaled a cloud of blue smoke, he handed the cigar to Seddons who took it and placed it down, away from the table. Now Pearson surveyed the instruments laid out before him and selected a knife. With his eye he calculated where he would cut, then swiftly, cleanly, deeply, applied the sharp steel blade.
McNeil was watching the student nurses covertly. An autopsy, he reflected, would never be recommended viewing for the fainthearted, but even to the experienced the first incision is sometimes hard to take. Until this point the body on the table has at least borne physical resemblance to the living. But after the knife, he thought, no illusions are possible. This was not a man, a woman, a child, but merely flesh and bone, resembling life, yet not of life. This was the ultimate truth, the end to which all must come. This was the fulfillment of the Old Testament, “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
Using the skill, ease, and speed of long experience, Pearson began the autopsy with a deep “Y” incision. With three strong knife strokes he brought the top two branches of the “Y” from each shoulder of the body to meet near the bottom of the chest. Then from this point he cut downward, opening the belly all the way from chest to genitals. There was a hissing, almost a tearing sound, as the knife moved and the flesh parted, revealing a layer of yellow fat beneath the surface.
Still watching the student nurses, McNeil saw that two were deathly white, a third had gasped and turned away; the other three were stoically watching. The resident kept his eye on the pale ones; it was not unusual for a nurse to keel over at her first autopsy. But these six looked as if they were going to be all right; the color was coming back to the two he had noticed, and the other girl had turned back, though with a handkerchief to her mouth. McNeil told them quietly: “If any of you want to go out for a few minutes, that’s all right. The first time’s always a bit hard.” They looked at him gratefully, though no one moved. McNeil knew that some pathologists would never admit nurses to an autopsy until the first incision had been made. Pearson, though, did not believe in shielding anyone. He felt they should see the whole thing from the beginning, and it was something McNeil agreed with. A nurse had to witness a lot of things that were tough to take—sores, mangled limbs, putrefaction, surgery; the sooner she learned to accept the sights and smells of medicine, the better for everyone, including herself.
Now McNeil slipped on his own gloves and went to work with Pearson. By this time, moving swiftly, the older man had peeled back the chest flap and, hacking the flesh loose with a larger knife, exposed the ribs. Next, using the sharp levered rib cutters, he cut his way into the rib cage, exposing pericardium and lungs. The gloves, instruments, and table were now beginning to be covered with blood. Seddons, gloved also, on his side of the table, was cutting back the lower flaps of flesh and opening the abdomen. He crossed the room for a pail and began to remove stomach and intestines, which he put into the pail after studying them briefly. The odor was beginning to be noticeable. Now Pearson and Seddons together tied off and cut the arteries so the undertaker would have no trouble when it came to embalming. Taking a small tube from a rack above the table, Seddons turned on a tap and began to siphon blood that had escaped into the abdomen and, after a nod from Pearson, did the same thing for the chest.
Meanwhile McNeil had applied himself to the head. First he made an incision across the vertex of the skull, starting slightly behind each ear and cutting above the hairline so the mark would not be visible if the body were placed on view by the dead man’s family. Then, using all the strength in his fingers, he peeled the scalp forward in one piece, so that all the flesh from the head was bunched over, the front of the face, covering the eyes. The entire skull was now exposed, and McNeil picked up the portable electric saw which was already plugged in. Before he switched it on he looked over at the student nurses to find them watching him with a mixture of incredulity and horror. Take it easy, girls, he thought; in a few minutes you’ll have seen it all.
Pearson was carefully removing the heart and lungs when McNeil applied the saw to bone. The metallic “scrunch” of the oscillating steel teeth biting into the skull cut grimly across the quiet room. Glancing up, he saw the girl with the handkerchief flinch; if she was going to vomit he hoped it wouldn’t be in here. He kept the blade cutting until the top of the skull was severed. He put down the saw. George Rinne would remove the blood from it when he cleaned all the instruments later. Now McNeil carefully pried loose the skull, exposing the soft membrane covering the brain beneath. Again he glanced at the nurses. They were standing up to it well; if they could take this they could take anything.
With the bony portion of the skull removed, McNeil took sharp scissors and opened the large vein—the superior sagittal sinus—which ran from front to rear along the center of the membrane. The blood poured out, spilling over the scissors and his fingers. It was fluid blood, he noted; there was no sign of thrombosis. He inspected the membrane carefully, then cut and lifted it clear to expose the mass of brain beneath. Using a knife, he carefully severed the brain from the spinal cord and eased it out. Seddons joined him, holding a glass jar half full of formalin, and McNeil gently lowered the brain into it.
Watching McNeil, his hands steady and competent, Seddons found himself wondering again what went on in the pathology resident’s mind. He had known McNeil for two years, first as a fellow resident, though senior to himself in the hospital’s pyramid system, and then more closely during his own few months in Pathology. Pathology had interested Seddons; he was glad, though, it was not his own chosen specialty. He had never had second thoughts about his personal choice of surgery and would be glad when he went back to it in a few weeks’ time. In contrast to this domain of the dead the operating room was a territory of the living. It was pulsing and alive; there was a poetry of motion, a sense of achievement he knew he could never find here. Each to his own, he thought, and pathology for the pathologists.
There was something else about pathology. You could lose your sense of reality, your awareness that medicine was of and for human beings. This brain now . . . Seddons found himself acutely aware that just a few hours ago it was the thinking center of a man. It had been coordinator of the senses—touch, smell, sight, taste. It had held thoughts, known love, fear, triumph. Yesterday, possibly even today, it could have told the eyes to cry, the mouth to drool. He had noticed the dead man was listed as a civil engineer. This, then, was a brain that had used mathematics, understood stresses, devised construction methods, perhaps had built houses, a highway, a water works, a cathedral—legacies from this brain for other humans to live with and use. But what was the brain now?—just a mass of tissue, beginning to be pickled and destined only to be sliced, examined, then incinerated.
Seddons did not believe in God and he found it hard to understand how educated people could. Knowledge, science, thought—the more these advanced, the more improbable all religions became. But he did believe in what, for lack of better phrases, he thought of as “the spark of humanity, the credo of the individual.” As a surgeon, of course, he would not always deal with individuals; nor would he always know his patients, and even when he did he would lose awareness of them in concentrating on problems of technique. But long ago he had resolved never to forget that beneath everything was a patient—an individual. In his own training Seddons had seen the cocoon of personal isolation—a safeguard against close contact with individual patients—grow around others. Sometimes it was a defensive measure, a deliberate insulation of personal emotions and personal involvement. He felt strong enough himself, though, to get along without the insulation. Moreover, to make sure it did not grow, he forced himself sometimes to think and soliloquize as he was doing now. Perhaps it would surprise some of his friends who thought of Mike Seddons only as a buoyant extrovert to know some of the thoughts that went on inside him. Perhaps it wouldn’t, though; the mind, brain—or whatever you called it—was an unpredictable machine.