Every time I teach Medicine in Literature, it’s a little different – and each time, it’s a gift.
“Gift” was the throughline of our activities last week, including a discussion of organ and kidney donation, as described in Scottish physician Gavin Francis’s brilliant book ADVENTURES IN HUMAN BEING (2015). Francis, who describes himself in a TED talk as “an enthusiast of life,” gave a gift to one of my former students – now a medical student himself – when he wrote back in response to the student’s fan letter: “Human beings embody something quite marvelous, and it’s a privilege to be allowed to study human physiology and human life, and to be tasked with easing suffering in whatever modest way you can.” Life asks for our commitments and actions; it asks us to do our best to leave things better than we found them. We put hopes, actions, and best efforts – gifts of our own – out into the world each day, without ever knowing quite what we might get back. But no matter what form it takes, the value of a gift – says Francis, quoting the writer Lewis Hyde – is that it is given with no expectation of return. It is pure delight, pure joy, pure accident, pure generosity, pure hospitality to experience and to the world, pure miracle.
Look at that word again: miracle. Mir- has its roots in the Indo-European word for “smile,” which literally asks us to open our eyes and our mouths wider, letting the world in. When we spot something that brings us delight – when we admire it – we open our mouths and eyes wider, opening ourselves to the full range of human emotion and experience that’s coming. We’re opening ourselves to surprise. We’re opening ourselves to art. We’re opening ourselves to beauty. And it’s worth remembering: a hand, and a self, and a soul, must be open in order to receive, and to give.
And, last week, in a further gift, students had the opportunity to visit our college’s human anatomy lab for themselves.
Vividly I remember my first time in our anatomy lab as a new faculty member, now almost twenty years ago. Gowned and gloved, I tried hard not to panic at the sight of the draped figures on the table, unmistakeably human. The first five minutes were difficult. Walking out was tempting. But then a student, one of the senior pre-med majors who guided other students (and faculty) through the lab, caught my eye. “Here, Dr. Weldon,” he said. Reflexively, I reached out as he set one hemisphere of a human brain into each of my hands. There was the humble matter-of-fact flesh; there was the cerebellum, halved to reveal the branching structure inside that echoes the shape of the lungs and of the cottonwood tree outside the windows of my classroom: arbor vitae, the tree of life. And my eyes and mouth opened wide in wonder, wholly involuntarily, as I began to cry.
Why was I crying? Maybe because I was feeling what I have learned and believed since my Alabama Methodist childhood: the miracle of the divine is its willing incarnation in our mortal, humble, mysterious, miraculous flesh. The word became flesh, and dwelt among us. Look at that word again: in-carn-ate. Carn-, in its Latin root, is flesh (the Spanish carne). “Where is the soul?” my students have asked, again and again, this term. “It’s not here, but it’s also NOT not here.” As students and I touched, and looked, and learned in the anatomy lab, we also wondered. Maybe, we concluded, the soul is somehow perfused through the whole body, like blood filling healthy tissue. Maybe it is in the strings of the spinal cord, massed elegantly together like a violin bow in the protective, flexible channel of the vertebrae. Maybe it is in the luminous roofed chamber of the eye, where photons born in the heart of the sun eight and a half minutes ago fall in to create our world, instant to instant. Maybe, as Timothy Morton writes in a book currently blowing my mind, the soul, like God, is the constant shimmer and hum at the edge of our senses that is simply presence, simply the sound of our own blood perfusing our bodies in the mysterious moment of existence that leads us from one second to the next. “We can taste what’s in our mouths,” Francis writes, “touch what’s within our reach, smell within hundreds of metres and hear within tens of miles. But it’s only through our vision that we are in communication with the sun and stars.”
I am grateful for the gift of literature, which keeps perfusing my mind and my life with new ideas, new connections – and grateful, too, for the gift of my students’ bright, active, thoughtful voices, spirits, and presences. When the two come together, more gifts arise. In his chapter on the heart, Francis describes the phenomenon of “pump-head” (postperfusion syndrome), the strange and shattering alienation and personality disruption patients can experience when blood is returned to the body after having been mechanically circulated and oxygenated during a transplant. Is there something about the body’s own pulses and rhythms, Francis asks, that is essential to humanity? That literally holds our body and soul together?
Elsewhere in the chapter, Francis quotes Robin Robertson’s poem “The Halving,” based on the poet’s own heart surgery, which describes “a carbon-coated disc broken from its sterile pouch / then heavily implanted into the native heart.” One student seized on this phrase: The native heart. Combined with my current work on (and deep suspicion of) AI and social media, this phrase sparked a new idea in our discussion: what if “pump-head” is a physical analogue to the kind of alienation technology induces?
Seriously. What if our technology is giving us all pump-head every day? It would explain and describe the kind of disruption and anger, even apparent psychosis, that it can induce in its users (from the steady disconnection of the Q-Anon-ed to the apparent Nazification of multibillionaires.) It could describe the unwilling, rapt, both-in-and-out-of-self feeling of addiction, the object of which, says one Stanford psychiatrist, can also be the effects of dopamine itself, as enabled by the never-quite-real world of the Internet. Hearkening back to Karl Marx’s formulation of industrialized labor as essentially alienating, Chris Hayes argues that our attention itself is a new form of labor, extracted and alienated from us without our full knowledge or consent. Like Kentucky mountaintops or factory shoats, we’re being farmed, stripped, mined, exploited for the very product that circulates as the lifeblood through twenty-first-century capitalism, alienated from the body and mind that produced it to nourish and nurture themselves. Humans need each other, and ourselves; we need the recirculating stream of conversation, reflection, and relationship that connect us and challenge us and change us. Tech is an alien diversion of that energy to corporate purposes that literally impoverish us, and our world.
When I asked my Medicine in Literature students about their experiences this January, they spoke of discussions like this, and of hearing and reading their peers’ thoughts, experiences, and writings, as moments that expanded their views in ways they really appreciate and value. They spoke of their love of reading having been “reawakened.” And they are grateful to the donors of the anatomy lab – our teachers – for the multiple reminders of the curiosity, compassion, and questioning that lie native in our hearts, longing to circulate into the living world.