"The Origin Of The Species" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES

by Katherine MacLean



May 10, 1953; 2:30 A.M.

DEAR JACK:

Some acts seem to change the meaning of the universe. Yesterday I killed.

It's a poor way to begin a letter, I admit. I'm writing this down because I have to tell someone, now; because I can't keep it to myself, and no one else is awake. Looking out the window, I can see the empty streets of our little suburb lying silvered in the moonlight. I can't wake anyone at this hour to talk to him, though I desperately want to hear a human voice. This letter is the next best thing.

You don't know much about my work, Jack, only that I am a neurosurgeon. We play cards together, and argue politics, and you and your wife invite me to theater parties and try to marry me off to pretty girlsЧbut I don't think I've ever told you exactly what I do.

I operate on brains.

I take out parts of people's brains; that is my profession.

I am well known in my field, for I do what other neurosurgeons cannot do. At first it was just small tumors that I took out, and then I progressed to removing smaller and smaller tumors that others could not find, and injured tissue that others could not locate, the tiny scars of old concussions and birth injuries that send electric pulsations out of phase with the waves of the rest of the brain, and so cause seizuresЧwhat is called epilepsy.

I open up their skullsЧit's all very mechanical, Jack, mere carpentry. The patient is conscious, but reassured and calm, knowing that he won't feel anything. His head is shaved and screened off with towels so he can't see what I am doing. I cut the scalp in three sides of a wide square and fold the skin back from the bone. Then I take a wide drill and drill four holes through the thick skull bone, one at each corner of the square, then take a hand drill with a small rotary saw blade and run the buzzing blade slowly from one hole to another. It is a trap door of bone now. An assistant pries it up, turns it back. (There is almost no blood and, afterwards, only a few thin scars to show for it.)

I can see the brain now through a thin tough lining of dura. I cut the dura with scissors and fold it back like a page of a book. And there it is, the living brain, grey and quivering slightly with the throbbing of the few blood vessels branching on its surface.

I have to locate the spot that is causing the trouble, and rapidly now. It is difficult to see anything in the curves and folds of soft grey. An assistant hands me an electrode that gives tiny currents of electricity, a current so small that if it touches the scar I am searching for it will not set off a seizure, but the patient will recognize the sensation of one coming, the odd emotion, the dizziness and distance and "aura" that warns a second before an attack and say, "There it is." I touch the pencil electrode here and there over the grey sum face, the tiny current here bringing alive an old memory in the patient's mind, here making one of his fingers twitch, here bringing a sensation of watching something green spinning before his eyes.

"There it is. That felt like it. Getting warmer, Doc," he says, and I bend closer, touching the electrode in narrowing circles, and then I see it, a tiny section of grey that is different and rougher, a twisting of tiny blood vessels in it that makes a pinkness and wrong color.

I take the scar out gently, using a little sucking tube that wiffles air into itself with a sighing noise and pulls the soft detachable grey layer up into itself, leaving a small section of unthinking, unelectrical, passive white shining through from inside. . .

The operation is expensive, tremendously so. The hospital will pay only part. The patient and his family are poorЧthey always are; it is difficult for a man who has spasms to hold a job, and then there's the cost of the accidents and hurts that come from the inevitable falling when the seizures strike.

So I often stand with the insufflater hissing in my hand for one minute more, trying to think of something else I can do, some other wayЧbut time is precious. I bend forward again and begin. The grey delicate layers of thought and of perceptive feeling, the layers that mean sensitivity with the hands and skill with the fingers go easily up into the little tube like soft, damp fluff and leave a widening circle of white.

It is the left hemisphere I make useless, the left hemisphere that controls feeling and thinking and skills in right-handed people. This patient was right-handed and left-brained; now he will have to be left-handed, and learn now to think and feel and regain his old skills as best he can with the right half-brain that remains. He is middle-aged; it will be hard to change and begin again. But it is better perhaps than falling down in fits and cracking his head against the pavement until he has no brain at all.

I have a reputation. They say that I know more about the human brain than any man who has ever lived. They have heard of my skill in London and Prague and Paris and Moscow and New York, and surgeons come from all these places to watch me operate.

From these operations, from looking at the human brain, that marvelous instrument exposed before me almost daily, from touching it gently with electricity and hearing the patients report what odd sensations, what odd thoughts and memories come, I have learned much . . .

I do other kinds of operations, too. At first I operated only on epileptics. But it is not just scars that are damaging to the brain. Sometimes thoughts and memories make their own kind of scars, and do their own kind of damage. Having an occasional fit and falling down before an auto is not the worst thing that can happen to a man. He could live in an asylum and scream, "open open open," or "hat hat hat," day and night, alone in a cell, helpless in some inside agony no one can reach or soothe.

Experimenting despairingly, neurologists found that the severing frontal sections of the brainЧit is known as lobotomyЧwould cure those scars too. But they cut blindly. Often the operation stopped the screaming and brought peace, but usually a dull animal peace, and sometimes the peace of death.

Because of my knowledge and experience, I was asked to help the best and most precious spirits: the great conductor who had broken down; the author who could only write down the words that strange voices shouted in his mind; the over-worked statesman who could now listen only to imagined whisperings against himself; all the others with great responsibilities who had been broken by trying too hard to fulfill them.

So I began doing this other kind of operation. Because I knew the brain, could study their encephalograph brain-electricity charts and trace the convolutions carefully like a familiar map, I could take out merely that narrow small section that was giving them hurt, and destroy nothing else.