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In Search of Genius


Dr Thomas Harvey conducts Albert Einstein’s autopsy



The body itself was perfectly ordinary
of course, just as I expected.
But here between my hands I raise
a gift, an offering which is held
before me, like a sacrifice.
I set it down with reverence,
noting familiar features – see
the cerebellum with its fissures
closely set, transverse and curved.
All appears normal, for now.

So to the cortex. Accompany me –
let us walk around the hemispheres
enjoy their glistening surfaces:
the superolateral and the medial
(the inferior is presently hidden)
following folds, traversing sulci –
across the longitudinal fissure
I skim, an arctic explorer on my sled
over hills and valleys, there is so much
awaiting discovery.

I pick up my knife, the round-ended one,
as I search for the genius that lived and died here.
The slices begin.  Each falls away softly
like cheese.  A key hole appears
gradually growing into a chamber
fit for a pharaoh perhaps, although
empty of course, it hasn’t been robbed.
Many a ventricle I have cut open –
they all look like this.  The brain of a genius
is so far no different.

Now I have come to the end of the loaf.
The slices lie stacked like slabs in a yard
awaiting attention. My searching continues.
I part them, laying one flat, in order
to study the surface.  Colour banded, indented
a coastline of estuaries, inlets and fjords
laid out on this map of departures, arrivals
transactions and contacts. Still there’s no sign
of anything different, let alone special
in this particular brain.

No, not a map, as this is uncharted.
I search for a simile.  More like a picture –
each sliver is topped by soft rolling hills
or this is the sapwood and here is the hardwood,
or see it as cline adjacent to anticline…
I’ll turn to the microscope later to find
if there’s evidence there of genius.
I doubt it. This promising brain seems just the same
as everyone else’s. Stop the search.
An ordinary brain is enough for a genius.




Autopsies can’t fail to be fascinating.

Well, that’s how I see it, but then I decided to study medicine because I found it fascinating.  Perhaps others feel differently.
Dr Thomas Harvey was certainly fascinated by Einstein’s brain – fascinated to the extent that he took it without permission.  The journey that brain took, along with Harvey’s own journey, is quite a story. You can look it up too.

In this poem I wanted to become Dr Harvey – to try to experience his thoughts and feelings, in the present tense.  Einstein’s brain, here in his hands – the opportunity to search for the source of genius in this unique brain!

Of course, as has happened so often, he was going to be disappointed – but that’s for later. Perhaps he should have realised, as the first two lines suggest, just as the body of a genius is ‘perfectly ordinary’, the brain may well be the same.

But then Harvey wasn’t very clever, managing later to fail his routine competency exams and having to find work in a factory on an assembly line.  Alongside Einstein, none of us is very clever.

For now though, privileged indeed, he stands holding the brain of a genius.

Let the exploration begin…

I love those latin words which have been used by medical people down the ages.  They roll descriptively round and from the mouth – cerebellum, the little brain at the back of the main brain; sulci, grooves, furrows, trenches; cortex, the outer layer like bark, rind or peel; and all those spatial descriptors – superior, inferior, medial and lateral… the list goes on and on.  As s/he speaks them, the doctor is reassured, comforted and guided, as if wrapped in the warmth and knowledge of Prospero’s cloak.

And the explorer can travel – take flight even, even as – or because – routine procedures are being followed.  I don’t know whether Harvey was at all poetic, but he is now me – or I him – so I don’t apologise for taking pleasure in imagining entering exotic landscapes or historic sites.

And so the traveller proceeds, with familiar tools, using accustomed techniques, searching for something – to tell the truth – s/he’ll never find.  Life has departed, the bird has flown – this is dead, abandoned country. The mistaken scientist becomes increasingly aware they were never going to discover that elusive spirit, however many slices this unique brain will eventually yield (12 sets of 200 slides), all the painstaking microscopy and all the scientific discussions and arguments.

Harvey is not to know that after seizing that brain, like one of Tutankhamun’s tomb interlopers, his life appears to be cursed – he will lose job, wife and career at prestigious Princeton.


I leave him for now in (dubious) possession of an ordinary brain – no more, no less.  It may have worked out the theory of relativity and made possible the development of nuclear fission, but it’s just normal – ultimately the same as his, as mine and as yours.



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