[P]sychoanalyst Carl Sword recounted a conversation with [one of England’s top neurosurgeons, who said], “I have no compassion for those whom I operate on…. In the theater I am reborn: as a cold, heartless machine, totally at one with scalpel, drill and saw. When you’re cutting loose and cheating death high above the snowline of the brain, feelings aren’t fit for purpose. Emotion is entropy, and seriously bad for business. I’ve hunted it down to extinction over the years.”
This post’s title?
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
June 28th, 2015 at 11:17AM
I ask myself why Eliot went with the image of “bleeding hands” here. This surgeon is portrayed as competent, so would not “bloody hands” or “bloodied hands” have been more apt? Competent surgeons don’t cut themselves.
June 28th, 2015 at 11:33AM
adam: I suspect the bleeding goes with the “wounded” idea – the surgeon is just as subject to the conditions of mortal existence as everyone else… And I think Eliot might also want the reader to think of Jesus, his hands bleeding on the cross…
June 28th, 2015 at 1:45PM
in my experiences with surgeons they haven’t so much actively shut down some aspects of themselves as they don’t experience themselves as working on persons but rather on parts, not unlike auto-mechanics, it’s very technically demanding work (in a very artificial theater) and only so much attention to go around, now as for the personality types that our system usually grooms for such positions that’s another (less benign) story and of course our medical model/economics doesn’t exactly encourage a lot of interaction (getting to know you time) with patients, anyway not so much splitting/compartmentalizing but differing contexts/roles. hmm maybe i’m killing the poetry here so..