Heroes Not Zombies

In Noga Arikha’s excellent Passions and Tempers, A History of the Humours, (ISBN 978-0-06-073116-8) she traces the history of the concept of the four humours, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, across cultures and centuries. Early in the book she describes the great library in Alexandria in the third century BC. The library was part of the Museion, a real hothouse of learning and research in the city founded by Ptolemy I Soter. What I hadn’t known before about this great academy completely shocked me. Ptolemy authorised not only human dissections of cadavers, but also the vivisection of condemned criminals.

Vivisection perhaps seemed cruel and gruesome, but, he wondered, was it really so terrible to hurt a small number of criminals for the sake of finding cures for the long term, and for a large number of good people? Whether the Ptolemies used such a justification or not, anatomical knowledge sprouted from the flaying of outlaws.

That paragraph stopped me in my tracks. Can you imagine? How does a person motivated to do good by reducing the suffering wrecked by disease, get to the place of justifying the live dissection of a human being? I know it was a different culture and a different Age, but what horrified me about this story was the appalling reduction of a person to, well, a piece of meat.
But then, I’m sure you’d be quick to point out to me, such awful cruelty has far from vanished from this Earth. There are plenty of reports of torture, mutilation and murder in the daily newspapers. But it was the context which really struck me. Maybe I’m naive, but I’ve always assumed that at least one of the motivations of physicians is compassion for those who suffer. But surely those Alexandrian physicians must have completely switched off their compassion to treat other human beings this way? Surely someone like Mengele, to give an example closer to our own lifetimes, was an abhorrent exception?
There are many aspects of this issue we could explore but the main thought which occurred to me as I pondered this tale, was how the reduction of a person to a mere body seemed to be a key characteristic of this behaviour. In that light, how much more important is it for us, to maintain a holistic engagement with those who are sick, and not reduce them to only material, physical bodies?
We physicians are not technicians of the body, we human beings struggling to understand and help other human beings.
We are all more than mere bodies.
We are conscious, sentient beings; heroes not zombies.