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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