Though it was understood, almost from my birth, that I would be a doctor (and specifically, my mother hoped, a surgeon), these precocious experiences turned me against medicine, made me want to escape and turn to plants, which had no feelings, to crystals and minerals and elements, above all, for they existed in a deathless realm of their own, where sickness and suffering, pathology, held no sway.
When I was fourteen, my mother arranged with a colleague, a professor of anatomy at the Royal Free Hospital, that I should be inducted into human anatomy, and Professor G., agreeable, took me to the dissecting room. There, on long trestles, lay the bodies, wrapped in yellow oilskin (to keep the exposed tissues from drying when they were not being dissected). This was the first time I had ever seen a corpse, and the bodies looked oddly shrunken and small to me. There was a horrible smell of mortified tissue and preservative in the air, and I came near to fainting as I went in – there were spots before my eyes and a sudden surge of nausea. Professor G. said she had selected a body for me, the body of a fourteen-year-old girl. Some of the girl had been dissected already, but there was a nice, untouched leg I could start on. I had a desire to ask who the girl was, what she had died of, what had brought her to such a pass – but Professor G. preferred no information, and in a way I was glad, for I dreaded to know. I had to think of this as a cadaver, a nameless thing of nerves and muscles, tissues and organs, to be dissected as one would dissect a worm or a frog, to learn how the organic machine was put together. There was a manual of anatomy, Cunningham’s Manual, at the head of the table; this was the copy the medical students used when they were dissecting, and its pages were yellowed and greasy with human fat.
My mother had bought me a Cunningham the week before, so that I had some knowledge, but this in no way prepared me for the actual experience, the emotional experience, of dissecting my first body. Professor G. started me off with a broad initial incision down the thigh, parting the fat and exposing the fascia beneath. She gave me various tips, then she thrust the scalpel into my hand – she would be back in half an hour, she said, to see how I was getting on.
It took me a month to dissect the leg; the most difficult was the foot, with its little muscles and stringy tendons, and the knee joint, with all its complexity. Occasionally I could feel how beautifully everything was put together, could enjoy an intellectual and esthetic pleasure such as my mother got from surgery and anatomy. Her own professor, in her medical student days, had been the famous comparative anatomist Frederic Wood-Jones. She loved the books he had written – Arboreal Man, The Hand, and The Foot – and cherished the copies he had inscribed for her. She was amazed when I said I could not ‘understand’ the foot. ‘But it is like an arch’, she said, and started drawing feet – drawings an engineer might have done, from every angle, to show how the foot combined stability with flexibility, how beautifully designed or evolved it was for walking (though bearing obvious residues of its original, prehensile function too).
I lacked my mother’s powers of visualization, her strong mechanical and engineering sense, but I loved it when she talked of the foot and drew, in rapid succession, the feet of lizards and birds, horses’ hooves, lions’ paws, and a series of primate feet. But this delight in understanding and appreciating anatomy was lost, for the most part, in the horror of the dissection, and the feeling of the dissecting room spread to life outside – I did not know if I would ever be able to love the warm, quick bodies of the living after facing, smelling, cutting the formalin-reeking corpse of a girl my own age.
20. Penetrating Rays
It was in Abe’s attic that I was introduced to cathode rays. He had a highly efficient vacuum pump, and an induction coil – a two-foot-long cylinder wound with miles and miles of densely coiled copper wire and set on a mahogany base. There were two large moveable brass electrodes above the coil, and when the coil was switched on, there would leap between them a formidable spark, a miniature lightning bolt, something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. Uncle showed me how he could separate the electrodes until they were too far apart to spark and then connect them to a yard-long vacuum tube. As he reduced the pressure in the electrified tube, a series of extraordinary phenomena appeared inside it: first a flickering light with red streamers like a miniature Aurora Borealis, then a brilliant column of light filling the whole tube. As the pressure was lowered still further, the column broke into discs of light separated by dark spaces. Finally, at a ten-thousandth of an atmosphere, everything became dark again inside the tube, but the end of the tube itself started to glow with a brilliant fluorescence. The tube was now filled, Uncle said, with cathode rays, little particles shot off the cathode with a tenth the speed of light, and so energetic that if one converged them with a saucer-shaped cathode they could heat a piece of platinum foil to red heat. I was a little afraid of these cathode rays (as I had been, as a child, of the ultraviolet rays in the surgery), for they were both potent and invisible, and I wondered if they could leak out of the tube and dart at us, unseen, in the darkened attic.
Cathode rays, Uncle Abe assured me, could travel only two or three inches in ordinary air – but there was another sort of ray, far more penetrating, which Wilhelm Roentgen had discovered in 1895 while experimenting with just such a cathode-ray tube. Roentgen had covered the tube with a cylinder of black cardboard to prevent any leakage of cathode rays, and yet he was astounded to observe that a screen painted with a fluorescent substance lit up brilliantly with each discharge of the tube, even though it was halfway across the room.
Roentgen immediately decided to drop his other research projects in order to investigate this totally unexpected and almost incredible phenomenon, repeating the experiment over and over again to convince himself that the effect was authentic. (He told his wife that if he spoke of it without the most convincing evidence, people would say, ‘Roentgen has gone mad.’) For the next six weeks he investigated the properties of these extraordinarily penetrating new rays and found that, unlike visible light, they could not, apparently, be refracted or diffracted. He tested their ability to pass through all sorts of solids and found they could pass to some degree through most common materials and still activate a fluorescent screen. When Roentgen placed his own hand in front of the fluorescing screen, he was astonished to see a ghostly silhouette of its bones. A set of metal weights, similarly, became visible through their wooden box – wood and flesh were more transparent to the rays than metal or bone. The rays also affected photographic plates, he found, so that in his first paper he was able to publish photographs taken by the X-rays, as he called them – including a radiograph of his wife’s hand, her wedding ring encircling a skeletal finger.
On January 1, 1896, Roentgen published his findings and first radiographs in a small academic journal. Within days the major newspapers of the world picked up the story. The sensational impact of his discovery horrified the shy Roentgen, and after his initial paper and a verbal presentation the same month, he never discussed X-rays again, but returned to working quietly on the varied scientific interests which had engrossed him in the years before 1896. (Even when he was awarded the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901 for his discovery of X-rays, he declined to give a Nobel speech.)