With a little more force, I am finally able to pluck the little vampire off
a finger and the assembly groans in appreciation, “Yaaaa.” I repeat this
two more times, with the fingers oozing at the attachment sites. One by
one I then reach into the little jar and pick out a slimy creature and drag it
onto a finger. With a little wriggle, the sluglike animal positions itself on
the finger and a firm linkage is established. Gabriel has remained
motionless the entire time, and he and I make eye contact again. We have
no words in common beyond a simple greeting, but we do share at this
moment thousands of years of medical tradition—the art of bloodletting.
Although bleeding a patient is no longer practiced in America, there are
still places in the world where bloodletting occurs in a fashion that goes
back 2,500 years to the very beginning of medicine. My medical
forefathers couldn’t have dreamed of refabricating fingers to a hand, even
one hundred years ago. But they would have been enchanted by the notion
of leeches sucking “bad blood.”
On the left bank of the River Seine, in Paris’s labyrinthine Latin Quarter,
are situated dozens of buildings associated with the Sorbonne, including
the Université Paris 5 René Descartes. Located on the rue de l’École de
Médecine, the university’s greatest building is a 17th-century colonnaded
structure that houses an enthralling museum of medicine and a library.
Inside the building, at the end of the lobby, stands a life-size stone
sculpture of a veiled woman who gently lifts a shroud away from her face
and upper body, revealing her placid countenance and exposed breasts. The
sculpture is titled La Nature se dévoilant à la science, or Nature is
revealed through science.
In this place of great learning, this monument captures the very essence
of the scientific program of the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution,
wherein mankind removed the opaque veil from the distinctive beauty of
nature. Centuries had passed since the philosophical and artistic
revolutions of ancient Greece, but as medieval darkness gave way to the
light of learning, a rekindling of an enlightened curiosity took hold across
Europe. The 15th century was a time of exploration, innovation, and
reinvention of communication via new technology—much like our current