As soon as he started studying medicine, Andrés Miranda knew that his vocation was not entirely pure. In a way, he always felt incomplete because he didn’t share the other students’ surgical passion; he was more interested in slides and microscopes than in the practical sessions; he preferred the blackboard to the scalpel. While his colleagues couldn’t wait to get down to some practical work, Andrés was happy to postpone that moment. The idea of being in an operating room, dealing with some emergency, didn’t excite him at all. It didn’t repel him either, but it obviously wasn’t the clinical area for which he felt most enthusiasm. He always felt it was a purely personal thing, and felt more drawn to research, to observation and analysis, than to the practical application of medicine. Many years later, reading The Wounded Body, an invaluable philosophical dictionary written by Cristóbal Pera, Andrés at last found the words he had so needed to read during his first years at university: “If we use the war-like language so often used as a global metaphor in surgery, the cruel surgical operation is an act of violence, in which physical force is needed to penetrate the patient’s anatomical space, to subjugate the ‘enemy’—the sickness made concrete in the lesion — to disarm and destroy it.” That definition perfectly described a spirit, an inner attitude that Andrés did not have, had never had. The thought of actually invading another body didn’t thrill him in the least. Even assuming that it was necessary and was an act of salvation, his medical vocation seemed always to be somewhere else, stirred by different impulses. Cristóbal Pera adds: “Surgical violence has created the image of the surgeon’s power over the patient and the latter’s surrender in a ritual of submission.” Nevertheless, for Andrés, the power lay elsewhere, in the space occupied by knowledge. This was his way of coming to terms with what might be considered a weakness. He preferred the knowledge of books to the knowledge of the hands.
He still remembers how the time he spent working in hospitals was always the most tiresome part of the whole course. Understanding how bodies work was still his passion, but doing something to a living body, interfering in another’s breathing, intervening in another’s blood, invading another’s flesh, was not an important part of his vocation. He never rejected the experience, but he probably never enjoyed it either. The idea of knowing that he was before, on, or in a living body slightly inhibited his own motivation, his own skill. It wasn’t the bodies that intimidated him, but knowing that he had a definite responsibility toward them. Perhaps that’s why he felt more comfortable with corpses.
In his university days, corpses were divided into two groups: the mummies and the freshers. The names said everything. The stiffs, which had been used before, belonged to the first group; the newly dead to the second category. No one liked working with the mummies. It was like being with a dummy, it always felt slightly unreal. The mummy was like an old vinyl record that has become more and more chipped over time. A mummy might have a couple of toes missing from its right foot. Once, some joker stubbed out a cigarette on the cheek of a dead boy. That kind of thing happened with the mummies. Any sessions with them gave rise to laughter, childish jokes, distance. The freshers, on the other hand, provoked, at least initially, silence and a strange intimacy.
For Andrés, corpses were an ideal middle path, halfway between books and the emergency operation. They weren’t the mere illustration of a text; they had volume, presence, they were real bodies and yet, at the same time, not entirely real, not the whole truth: they lacked warmth, feeling, urgency. It was precisely in that unreal reality that Andrés found his place. So much so that, more than once, he had wondered if his destiny didn’t lie in performing autopsies; he felt almost condemned to the field of diagnosing lifeless bodies, in which the only signs are the past, in which nothing beats and everything is merely mark or trace. For a long time, he felt his vocation was closer to producing “damage reports” than to “the saving of lives.” He belonged to the group or league who always arrive when there’s nothing to be done, when all that’s needed is a signature on the final balance sheet.
As he progressed in his career, it became clearer to him that in his professional life he was more suited to research or teaching. The prospect of dealing with patients on a daily basis, as part of his work routine, became less and less attractive. It implied a risk he wasn’t sure he wanted to run — making a mistake. Making a mistake in a laboratory was quite different from doing so in an operating room. At the time, Andrés began to fall under the spell of the famous Flemish doctor, Andreas Vesalius. He shared with him not only a first name, but a passion for study, a fascination with how the human body works. From him he also learned that curiosity is a high-risk occupation and that peering in at the enigmas of medicine can prove fatal.
Andreas Vesalius was born in Brussels in 1514. He was a brilliant man and considered to be the founder of modern anatomy. He studied in Paris, taught at Leuven, became a professor at Bologna University, and ended up working as a doctor in the imperial court of Charles V. In 1543, he published his work De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, a groundbreaking study of the structure of the human body that openly questioned Galen’s theories. The book was illustrated with more than three hundred engravings that showed human anatomy as it had never been shown before in the history of civilization. From early on, Vesalius had made his mark on history. He would probably have gone on to do much more, but his life was touched by tragedy: in 1561, in Madrid, the court of the Holy Inquisition sentenced him to death.
Vesalius honed his talents largely on the work he did on dissecting corpses. He had also been given the necessary permissions and blessings to carry out this work. As far as one can ascertain, one fateful day, a body betrayed science: Vesalius opened up a dead man who wasn’t dead. Beneath the skin, beneath the thorax, a heart was still beating. Very feebly perhaps. Perhaps the last flicker of a life about to be extinguished. There was nothing to be done. But in that moment, science became a sin. Some studies say that the body belonged to a nobleman close to the throne, which seems unlikely, but what is known is that Philip II spoke up for Vesalius before the Inquisition and saved his life. One legend has it that the doctor was dressed in sackcloth and sandals and, to pay for his error, was condemned to wander the desert for the rest of his life. Another version of the story has the same tragic tone: Andreas Vesalius paid for his guilt by making a long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On the way back from Jerusalem, the ship in which he was traveling was wrecked in strange circumstances, taking Vesalius down with it. Thus he paid for his curiosity: either devoured by the desert or by the sea. Drowned in the void.
“Don’t succumb to Vesalius Syndrome,” Professor Armando Coll often said to them. “Don’t let that paralyze you.”
One afternoon, after class, he went for a drink with his students in a small, insalubrious restaurant called La Estrella China. It was near the university and the students went there because the booze was cheap enough for them to get drunk without spending the whole of their allowance. Professor Coll ordered a whisky. After two hours, and feeling less sober and in a more confiding mood, he confessed that he himself was a hostage to Vesalius Syndrome. That’s what he called it. He found the story terrifying. He couldn’t understand how humanity could have punished one of its most outstanding geniuses like that. “Vesalius was almost another Da Vinci,” he said. Andrés Miranda drank in every word, full of surprise and admiration. Before taking his leave, Professor Coll looked at them with a kind of melancholy pity.