The_Invention_of_Surgery

carved naked life-size figure floating forty feet above my head summons
me to stop in my tracks.
My private tour guide Luca, in a Bolognese-English accent, remarks,
“Apollo.” Suspended in space, Apollo gracefully points directly at the
white marble table next to me. Here is the Greek and Roman god of music,
truth, healing, and light, the son of Zeus and the father of Asclepius, the
most important god of medicine and healing. (Asclepius himself was the
father of several important goddesses associated with the medical arts,
including Hygieia and Panacea.) I strain to see what object is there behind
Apollo, and with some prompting from the guide I am delighted to
comprehend it is a lyre, appropriate equipment for our god of music.
Apollo swims overhead, and at first, I don’t understand the message of
the ancients. My wife and I are alone in the theater with the guide (who
was kind enough to not kick us out at closing time), and preoccupied with
trying to remember the astrological signs, I am missing the whole point.
Looking back at Luca, he gestures in a grand circle with his arm, “All of
these constellations are around Apollo, the god of light and the sun.
Imagine this room hundreds of years ago, with the light only coming in
through the windows. And Apollo is bringing light, or understanding, to
the room, which is why he points to the dissection table.”
I position my body until Apollo’s finger is pointing right at my face.
I want understanding.
Luca starts again, “While Apollo is at the center, and is the god of light,
he is surrounded by the main constellations, which in the 17th century had
the power over life and death, illness and disease.”
The power. Ancient man yearning to understand, to explain, if not
control the forces of disease. And then Luca says it. “The constellations
and Apollo, exert their influenza, our word for ‘influence.’ That is how we
got our word for the enigmatic disease, influenza, that was so inexplicable
to man since the dawn of modernity. What causes plagues, epidemics, and
pandemics? The stars, the gods. Influenza.”
Now my eyes trace the same circle as Luca’s arm, my personal Apollo,
as I hurriedly gaze at the dizzying astrological divinities. Not that long
ago, in this hallowed room, the continent’s most promising students
gathered to understand the enigmas of the human body and what forces
bedeviled man. And in the most obvious demonstration, the esteemed
professors communicated to the students, it was the heavens that