As surgeons, we are practitioners of “unhallowed arts.”
I did not realize this until a few years ago, a revelation brought about not by a secretly shot cell-phone video, a caustic Yelp review or even a Plaintiff’s Attorney filing. Rather, my scales-from-the-eyes moment was occasioned by a literary bicentennial: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley’s masterwork, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. First published in 1818, the work has been dismissed, disputed, distorted and generally underappreciated. Critics of the time reviled its subject matter, perhaps the first example of what we know today as Science Fiction and very possibly the Ur-Text of Narrative Medicine. Originally published anonymously, authorship was often ascribed to Shelley’s more famous husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The book underwent two further revisions, the last in 1831 whereafter it more or less languished in literary backwaters until the 1930’s when Universal Pictures and director James Whale unleashed the story most of us think of today, featuring the mute, lumbering Boris Karloff scaring the pants off moviegoers. Simultaneously, it founded a cottage industry in which “Frankenstein’s Monster” became a cultural byword no less referenced than Occam’s Razor or Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Ask most people today and they associate the name Frankenstein only with Monster, although in Shelley’s tale he is The Creature, and is never referred to with that epithet. The good Doctor Frankenstein is the story’s villain, not for having created The Creature, but for failing to love and care for him afterward. At its heart it’s a story of cruelty and abandonment, and the monstrous effects of both.
In case you’re wondering, I was a heart surgeon for thirty years. And after all that time it now occurs to me that I and my ilk are really just kinder, gentler versions of Victor Frankenstein. No, we don’t fabricate creatures but we’ve been known to bring about life from apparent death with a bolt of lightning. We may call it internal defibrillation, but the idea’s the same. And we use spare parts we “harvest”, sometimes from soon-to-be if not actual cadavers. Come to think of it, a majority of our operations repeatedly involve a little “resurrection,” if you will, when the intentionally stopped heart beats again. Cue crescendo horns, swelling strings and scenery-chewing emoting.
I’m not sure that our art is currently all that hallowed, but it’s gained at least a modicum of respect over the years while simultaneously spawning several generations of movie and TV characters of its own – a case of Art imitating Life while imitating Art. And heart surgery is only in its early adolescence compared with Mary Shelley’s vision. She said the idea for the story came to her one night in a “waking dream.”
So why should a two-hundred-year-old manuscript written by a precocious nineteen-year-old woman resonate still today? Is it because we struggle with the same eternal questions? Is it because we still have only shadows for answers, like the dwellers in Plato’s cave?
Many years ago I resuscitated a young person after several hours of what appeared to be clinical death. He’d fallen through some thin ice into a frigid lake which helped preserve his fragile state. It was a long-shot gamble performed with a small heart-lung machine in a crowded Emergency Room. I can still recall it with crystal, if somewhat unsettling clarity: the utter silence as we waited for the blood to warm; the incessant beeping of the monitor alarm, drawing our already riveted attention to the persistent flat line of asystole; the murmurs when the chaos of ventricular fibrillation suddenly emerged and the audible gasp when the discharge from the paddles was followed by the rhythmic repetition of slow sinus beats. No wild emoting, no swelling strings, no exultant ripping off of eye protection – if memory serves, there was a simple “Wow. How about that?” which translated as something like “Well, what did we think was going to happen?”
I still get asked, “What did it feel like to bring someone back from the dead?” I always reply, “If he’d really been dead we couldn’t have revived him. He only appeared dead.” I do believe this is the truest and most honest answer to the question. It is, as they say, my story and I’m sticking to it.
And so it was that two hundred years after it was written I read, for the first time, Mary Shelley’s original story. I would recommend it to anyone who does what we do. We’re all in the same fight. We’re all looking for the same bolt of lightning. And there is much to be learned in the nested tales Shelley weaves. Whenever we operate on someone, we make them into something different than they were before. We have, by the very nature of our interventions, created something new and hopefully better, healthier, happier. What happens next bears considering. Do we take the fictional Dr. Frankenstein’s path and lose interest after our technical feat is accomplished? Or do we learn from his mistake, and show the same enthusiasm and care long after the Operating Room lights have dimmed?
Every case, be it medical or surgical, is a contest of sorts. Our opponent is, has always been, disease and untimely death. We strive to prevail. We do all we can to win. Technology and training have gifted us with fire from the gods. The Modern Prometheus is often and rightly referred to as a cautionary tale. Two centuries later, that caution is still warranted. It’s important that we win, but Shelley’s warning to us is, perhaps, to be aware, unlike Doctor Victor, that such victories must always be leavened with compassion.
Dan Waters DO MA is a retired Cardiothoracic Surgeon who has published extensively in the medicine, fiction, and satire. His books can be found at Bandageman Press.https://bandagemanpress.com/
