Scars

Speech, Anatomy Memorial Ceremony, WCM 2019 William J.H. Ford

My classmates and I began most, if not every, session in the gross anatomy lab listening to a surgeon describe the work they do. Often, these highly esteemed clinical faculty would show a video from a surgery or give a brief lecture on how the anatomical structures we were slated to learn that day were implicated in their field of surgery. We learned that a firm grasp of gross anatomy forms the scientific underpinning of clinical practice.

In Book 19 of Homer’s Odyssey, the hero Odysseus has returned from his years of wandering to his home in Ithaca in disguise. Odysseus’s wife Penelope, not recognizing Odysseus but believing him to be a former comrade of her husband, bids the family’s old slave Eurycleia wash the stranger’s feet in a gesture of hospitality. Eurycleia fills a basin with water and takes hold of the stranger’s leg, whereupon she feels a scar on his thigh. At once, she recognizes that the stranger is none other than her master Odysseus, returned home.

At this moment, Homer interrupts his narrative to explain, in painstaking detail, how it was that Odysseus came to acquire this scar during a boar hunt at his grandfather’s estate. To the modern reader, this interruption appears superfluous—why not mention merely that this scar identifies its bearer as Odysseus and then proceed directly with the action of the story? Why the long diversion into the past?

The human body is a physical record of an individual’s life course. The body has a tremendous capacity for self-renewal after an injury; yet traces still remain. Consider the arthritic joint that begins acting up before every thunderstorm; or that a heart attack may be treated, and the patient fully recover, but the metal stent used to pry a coronary artery back into patency will remain in the body forever. Joyous events, too, are captured indelibly on the body: stretch marks that remain after the birth of a long-expected and much-loved child, or the scars following a knee replacement that allows a patient to walk pain-free once more. Our personal history is written in flesh and blood.

We may have come to the lab to learn muscular attachments and nervous innervations; more importantly, we came to lay hands on our first patient. I would argue that herein lies the true virtue of our course

in anatomy: not in scientific knowledge gained, but in a humanistic encounter. We learned, in some small fashion, to be Eurycleia. Unlike Eurycleia, we did not have access to the history our donors brought with them to the lab; that knowledge lies with their families and friends. Nevertheless, in the laying on of hands, we do not merely seek to discover a fractured bone or palpitate the viscera. We are feeling for the physical traces left behind by the stories of our patients’ lives. We are trying—however hesitantly in this first year of our training—to communicate that our ears and eyes are open to these stories. When a stranger arrives on the threshold of our clinic or our hospital, we will listen to their story and feel for their scar.