Enlightening tales of the body’s hidden mysteries

NONFICTION

In 1822, William Beaumont, a doctor stationed at Fort Mackinac, Mich., rushed to aid a man who had been accidentally shot in the abdomen. The wound was horrendous.

"Not many people would be expected to survive an injury of this magnitude," writes F. González-Crussi in "Carrying the Heart: Exploring the Worlds Within Us," a fascinating look at our attempts to understand the human body's inner workings.

Against all odds, Beaumont nursed the man back to health, but a large hole exposing the inside of the man's stomach refused to close.

At some point, an idea occurred to Beaumont. By peering through the hole, he could actually watch the stomach work. Until then, the stomach largely had remained an organ of mystery.

Beaumont, an ambitious scientist far from medical labs or likeminded colleagues, began conducting his own experiments on the unfortunate man. It was all in the name of science, of course, but try telling that to the man who suffered through them.

Among Beaumont's experiments: pushing into the man's "stomach window" foodstuffs "tied to a string, so that he can withdraw it from the gastric cavity to follow the digestion process at various times, each time reintroducing it into the stomach," González-Crussi writes.

The man eventually fled to his native Canada and resisted Beaumont's efforts to retrieve him for more experiments. Who can blame him?

The case raises an important question about medical ethics, González-Crussi writes. Why didn't Beaumont (or other doctors) try to close the "stomach window" or help to alleviate the suffering it caused?

"All those with authority and medical knowledge who came in contact with him acted as if it was perfectly normal that he should exhibit himself to their curiosity, bow to their whims, and obey their orders unquestioningly; worse yet, that he should do all this with a feeling of humble gratitude for being able to contribute to the progress of science and the enlightenment of his betters," González-Crussi writes.

González-Crussi, a professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern University Medical School, has a special talent for finding memorable cases to illustrate his medical histories. "Carrying the Heart" teems with them.

In addition to Beaumont's journeys into the stomach, for example, González-Crussi recounts the story of Wilhelm Fliess, an Austrian physician and close friend of Sigmund Freud, who sought to relieve a variety of psychological and physiological complaints that Freud traced to sexuality by operating on the patient's nose.

Fliess's reasoning was simple. Because erectile tissue occurs only in two places in the human body -- the nose and the genitals -- doctors could treat sexuality-based neuroses by cauterizing or removing the offensive olfactory parts.

The way to a man's heart may be through his stomach, as the adage suggests, but the way to a woman's sexual health lay through her nose.

Inevitably, surgery on one of Fliess's patients went awry. Her health worsened after surgery, and eventually a new consultant investigating Fliess's handiwork pulled a piece of gauze -- more than 2 feet long -- from the surgical site.

"After this, Emma Eckstein made a slow recovery, except for a somewhat sunken appearance of her deboned nasal appendage," González-Crussi writes. "Of her neurotic symptoms, no appreciable change was perceived."

And speaking of the body's naughty bits, what, exactly, are those items reputed to be the severed penises of Napoleon Bonaparte and Grigori Efimovich Rasputin, "the mad monk" who tried to heal the hemophiliac son of Russia's last czar? Actually, González-Crussi doesn't have the answer to that one. But he has his suspicions. And his theory about why some of us care about such things is intriguing.

Titillating? Yes. But "Carrying the Heart" isn't a freak show of medical curiosities. As González-Crussi writes in the book's foreword, "By showing the elaborate effort with which the creative imagination has embroidered the body's interiority throughout the ages and across all cultures, I hope to underscore the significance of the symbolic dimension of our lives, which current medical techno-science largely disregards."

Believe me. If medical books were half as entertaining as "Carrying the Heart," we might see a few of them pop up on the best-seller lists.

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at http://www.thewag.net.