The_Invention_of_Surgery

else in the world exists, no other thoughts, no realities, no controversies.
Nothing funny, nothing sad, nothing interesting. I’m in a vacuum where
everything further than ten inches away vanishes.
My father was a Marine Corps sniper in Korea before becoming a
veterinarian. Curious about his military days, I watched a documentary on
sniper training, wherein elite marksmen like him were taught to deeply
inhale and exhale before squeezing the trigger. This same technique helps
me steady my hand during precise movements; I use it every day in the
operative theater.
After my brief breathing exercise, I move the scalpel blade to the
uppermost part of my planned incision. The razor-sharp blade is touching
the skin and yet no penetration of the metal edge has occurred until I
downwardly angle the instrument toward the elbow. New surgeons
notoriously misjudge the correct pressure required to properly cut through
the skin. Typically, rookie cutters barely scrape the skin, and their
supervisors joke about paperclips inflicting greater damage. However, too
great a pressure will plunge the knife deeply into the wound, causing
potentially catastrophic damage to deep nerves or arteries.
Cutting skin feels like slicing into a fresh peach. As I draw the knife
along the skin, yellow fat billows up from the wound. As we age, our skin
becomes thinner, so I account for this as my scalpel blade progresses
across Lisa’s shoulder. The tiny vessels along her skin’s edge emit droplets
of bright red blood where they have been transected; these must be
cauterized, or heat-sealed, with an electrothermal device called a
“Bovie.”
A perfectly executed cut penetrates only the dermis, leaving further
dissection to scissors and electrocautery. Having made the initial surgical
incision, I hand over the scalpel and retire the blade. The skin layers
contain dangerous bacteria (even after the most fastidious surgical prep),
which contaminate the “skin knife.” After mere seconds of use, that
scalpel blade is done forever.
Lisa doesn’t move and doesn’t recognize the violation of her body’s
boundaries.
The remainder of the shoulder replacement operation involves
exploring deeper and deeper layers of tissue. This kind of deep
investigation of the corpus was unimaginable at the same time that
photography, the telegraph, the steam engine, and perforated toilet paper