Autopsy Before the Cameras --- II

The effect of lighting on the mind has yet to be investigated fully. A whole gamut of emotions, an entire register of affective tones and sensations may be elicited by modifying the lights, and thus the colors of the existing decor. I am certainly not new to the autopsy suite, yet it seems to me that I watch the developments taking place here for the first time. An insistent question obtrudes itself repeatedly in my mind: What are we doing here? Ostensibly, we perform a technical procedure aiming to uncover pathologic diagnoses, some already suspected and some new. In the top university hospitals the autopsy is still expected to disclose, in about 8 percent of the cases, major diagnoses that were entirely unsuspected in spite of the most sophisticated medical investigations done during the patient's life. Thus the autopsy is central to institutional efforts to upgrade the quality of medical care and teaching. But is this all? All these manipulations, all these activities in and around a cadaver suggest something else. A rich allusiveness and something like a hidden symbolism appear to emerge, as if tapped from a hidden source, through the uncanny synergism of light and silence.

It is impossible to avert the thought that our busy and purposive manipulations move us into the realm of the sacred. If an alien, detached, and intelligent being from a remote past civilization --- say, a cultured Greek philosopher or a polished Chinese minister of the Heavenly Emperor from an ancient dynasty --- were to peek through the camera at this moment, he would conclude, that a religious ceremony of the utmost solemnity was being performed. For the opening of a human body is tantamount to penetrating the world of the sacred. Philosophers have remarked that mapping out space and establishing boundaries is the first step in the process of sacralization. Thus, not all the ground is the same: there is profane turf, which is left to lie fallow, and hallowed ground, wherein the faithful are interred. Not all houses are the same: there are unholy dens and houses of worship. There are cities of indifferent religious value and centers of pilgrimage, like Mecca, Lourdes, or Santiago de Compostela. Mircea Eliade opposed sacred space to scientific space; geometry he saw as the epitome of profaneness, since in geometry all space has exactly the same value, and the figures that are traced in this space can be done and undone without the least compunction. But if this is so, the interior of the human body is surely the epitome of the sacred, since it is never penetrated without fear, awe, or passion. The interior of the body houses the energy necessary for all vital activities, the mysterious spark that propels life's flow and animates its stubborn pulsations: the interior of the body is sacred space.

In surgery, as in the autopsy, this sacred space is abruptly violated. Paul Valéry described what takes place during this violation in an immortal speech to the College of French Surgeons. His description further persuaded me that my imaginary observer would have to conclude that he watched a religious ceremony of the deepest hieratic mystery. He would see a group of people robed from head to toe in strange vestments, talking in whispers to each other, masked, gloved, and never leaving the place of their ministrations, or if they do, never entering it again without first subjecting themselves to elaborate purification rites. One of them advances with a determined air, a scalpel in his hand --- surely, this must be the high priest --- and splits open the marvel of the human body.

The metaphysical consequences of this simple act I had appreciated thanks to Valéry. Its real-life correlate was now revealed to me in unaccustomed detail through the contrivances of filmmaking: the inner recesses of the abdomen, thorax, and cranium are suddenly set in continuity with the outer environment. Every recess of the sacred space, every sanctum sanctorum is unveiled; every tabernacle is turned over. The loops of bowel, until then blind snakes that crept in total darkness; the heart, until then mad nightingale beating itself against the barred walls of its dank dungeon; and the brain, undisturbed contemplator who preferred, as did Immanuel Kant, a lightless thinking room for his abstractions; all are brusquely enveloped by brilliant flashes of light, and the sound of voices, and the tinkling of stainless steel instruments, and the multifarious emanations of the outer air. Barriers have disappeared, and the realms of the sacred and the profane merge into one with all the momentum of a tidal wave.