Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (4 page)

A small roundish object, an egg-shaped piece of flesh, was quivering under my scalpel. I took hold of it in one hand and put it on the scales. I felt it with the tips of my fingers; its surface was soft and convoluted, just like the rabbit’s brain which I’d dug out of its little skull on the table earlier. Was it possible that this was the brain of a human being? Could this piece of moist tender flesh be the mighty human mind that had triumphed over nature and gone down into the bowels of the earth and up into orbit with the sun and moon, which could split rocks and move mountains and extract enough fire from atoms to destroy the world?

I seized the scalpel and cut the brain up into pieces, then the pieces into still more pieces. I looked and felt and probed and found nothing. Only a piece of soft flesh which disintegrated under my fingers.

I put a sliver of it under the microscope and saw nothing but round cells containing round nuclei like bunches of grapes. How did they work and make people aware and able to understand and feel? I opened the textbook and looked at the illustrations showing the workings of the brain. They were like drawings of complicated machinery, a television, an aircraft or a submarine, or like a map of the world: hundreds of transmitting and receiving posts, millions of nerves and thread-like filaments and I knew that the piece of flesh in my hand was in charge of all this. It received messages from all the organs of the body and then sent orders to them through strings of nerves. How could this be, this little ball of flesh giving orders to the heart, the arms, the legs; saying to the heart ‘Move’, to the arms ‘Go down’ or ‘Come up’, to the legs ‘Walk’ or ‘Stop’? How could this whole interwoven network of nerve cells operate without crashing into each other? What made it decode the secret of the messages sent to it by the eye, the nose, the ear, the tongue, the fingertips, without confusing them with each other? I looked back at the little round cells through the microscope and wondered again how life could invade these minute amounts of protoplasm and move and understand and know.

I opened my textbooks to look into this mystery. The chemistry books said that there may be chemical reactions which modify and activate the components of the substance. The physics books talked of electricity altering its atoms and releasing life, and the physiology book spoke of reflexes and secretions.

I began to read and search and probe until I’d learnt the structure and organization of the human body by heart. I learnt the names of all the parts of the nervous system and the way the nerve cells transmit messages around the body; the names of the veins and arteries, how long and broad they were, what sort of walls they had; the make-up of bones, bone marrow and blood; how I ate; how all my senses functioned; and how I slept and dreamt. I discovered how my heart beat and why I blushed; how I felt fire burning and how to draw my hand away from it; why I sweated with embarrassment and why my extremities turned cold through fear.

The heart was like a house: it had rooms with muscle-walls and valve-doors; the walls of one room contracted and its doors opened and forced the blood out of it into the next room whose muscular walls were relaxed, then the valve-door closed… The heartbeats were the small noises made by the blood going from one room to another and the doors opening and shutting. But how did the heart muscles know when to contract and when to relax? A message! A telegram transmitted to them by a nerve connected to a centre in the chest, which led in turn to one of the centres in the brain. How did the blood from the lungs reach the heart and how did it go back once more to the lungs to be purified? It was all controlled by a precise and strict system. Every cavity in the body had a special membrane and the blood pressure was strictly regulated as it passed ceaselessly from vessel to vessel.

Why did I feel fire burning my finger? Because the nerve endings in my fingers transmitted a message to the brain, which interpreted it as being a pain caused by burning and sent a rapid message to my arm muscles ordering them to contract and take my finger away from the fire. Who would have thought that these messages could flow back and forth between the fingertips and the brain in the time it takes us to remove our fingers from the heat which is burning them?

I didn’t sweat from embarrassment until negotiations had taken place between the nerve centres in my brain and my sweat glands, culminating in the brain ordering the glands to shed their drops of moisture.

My extremities didn’t get cold until the fear had been signalled to my brain and it had given the order to the blood vessels at the surface of my skin to shrink so that the blood left them ready to deal with any possible injury.

I learnt how images and sounds were transmitted to the brain from the eye and the ear. And how living organisms became bread, an inanimate substance, in the heat of the oven, and how this was then converted to living tissue in the warmth of human insides.

I learnt that while I slept, part of my brain remained alert and conscious, watching over my heartbeats and whispered breathing and controlling my dream pictures. It saved me from falling out of bed when I flew on the back of a charger up into the sky, or fell through the air and drowned in the roaring ocean. And it woke me up before I wet the bed in fright when a demon of the forest sunk his teeth into my flesh.

A vast new world opened up before me. At first I was apprehensive, but I soon plunged avidly into it, overwhelmed by a frenzied passion for knowledge. Science revealed the secrets of human existence to me and made nonsense of the huge differences which my mother had tried to construct between me and my brother.

Science proved to me that women were like men and men like animals. A woman had a heart, a nervous system and a brain exactly like a man’s, and an animal had a heart, a nervous system and a brain exactly like a human being’s. There were no essential differences between them! A woman contained a man inside her and a man concealed a woman in his depths. A woman had male organs, some apparent and some hidden, and a man had female hormones in his blood. Human beings had truncated tails in the form of a few little vertebrae at the base of their spinal columns; and animals shed tears.

I was delighted by this new world which placed men, women and the animals side by side, and by science which seemed a mighty, just and omniscient god; so I placed my trust in it and embraced its teachings.

All I could see of him was his little face, his eyes searching desperately for some sign of sympathy and his thin bare arms trembling with cold. His body was completely hidden under hard metal discs with rubber tubes protruding from them, ending in human ears that looked like rabbits’ ears. The stethoscopes were raised momentarily to reveal parts of his bare chest but others quickly came down in their place; some were held in rough, swollen fingers, others in soft hands with red-painted finger nails, and they compressed his childish ribs with the cold metal.

I heard the professor’s voice saying, ‘Come and listen to these heartbeats.’

The hands of my fellow students crowding round the sick child pushed me forward and I stood waiting with the stethoscope attached to my ears until a small space became vacant on the thin body. I saw the round red indentation left by the previous instrument; my own swayed uncertainly in my hand and I found it impossible to place it on the inflamed body; my hand began to shake uncontrollably. At that moment I was pushed roughly aside and the crowd of students swept me back from the bed. A student wearing thick glasses took my place and jammed his stethoscope unhesitatingly on to the child’s chest as if he hadn’t seen the angry circle there. A feeble complaint broke from the child’s dry lips and went unheard in the noisy crowd competing for a place around his sickbed.

I suppressed an urge to scream at the top of my voice and my hands struggled against my reason in an attempt to break free and tear these harsh fingers holding the stethoscope away from the child’s chest. But I stood there with my mouth shut and my hands still; for my reason remained alert and strong and true to science; and the god of science is mighty and merciless…

He stood in front of me with his bare legs twisted and covered in thick hair. He looked at me in protest: ‘Shall I take off my underpants too?’

The professor looked back at him coldly and unrelentingly and ordered, ‘Take off all your clothes!’

The sick man went on looking at me in consternation and hesitantly took hold of the waistband of his pants. Allowing him no respite, the professor strode forward and pulled them down, leaving the man stark naked before us.

I put on the sterile gloves and advanced towards him. He fidgeted in embarrassment and irritation… How could a woman make him undress and then examine him? He tried hard to back away but the professor slapped his face hard, after which he submitted to my probing fingers as if he were a corpse.

The god of science knows no mercy and no shame. How harsh he was! How much I suffered in my worship of him! The body of a living person lost all respect and dignity and became exactly like a dead body under my gaze and my searching fingers, and disintegrated in my mind into a jumble of organs and dismembered limbs.

The night was cold and desolate, the darkness dead and still. The great hospital with its lighted windows crouched in the dark like a wild hyena. The patients’ groans and racking coughs tore at the curtains of the night. I stood alone at the window of my room, staring at the little white flower opening in the vase beside me. As I touched it I shuddered as if I was a corpse touching a living thing for the first time. I brought it close to my face and inhaled its perfume, feeling like a condemned prisoner pressing his nose against the iron bars of his cell to breathe in the fragrance of life. I put my hand up to my neck and my fingers brushed the metal arms of the stethoscope encircling my neck like a hangman’s noose. The white coat hung round my shoulders reeking of ether, disinfectant and iodine.

What had I done to myself? Bound my life to illness, pain and death; made my daily occupation the uncovering of people’s bodies so that I could see their private parts, feel their swollen sores and analyse their secretions. I no longer saw anything of life except sick people lying in their beds dazed, weeping or unconscious; their eyes dull, yellow or red; their limbs paralysed or amputated; their breathing irregular; their voices hoarse or groaning in pain. Could I bear this life sentence for the rest of my days? I felt a deep gloom like a prisoner must feel when his last flicker of hope has disappeared.

I left my room and went to sit in the big common room. I opened a medical journal and tried to read it, but I couldn’t help my thoughts straying to the doctors’ wing where the colleague on night duty was now asleep. For no obvious reason it occurred to me that I was alone with a man in the middle of the night and only a closed door separated me from him. Although I was wide awake this idea came to me like a dream and I felt afraid… No, not afraid, worried… No, not even that, for I felt desire, or not quite desire but a strange disturbing feeling that made me glance furtively at the closed door from time to time.