Alive: An alternative anatomy de Gabriel Weston Review – Our bodies in a new revealing light | Health, spirit and body books
IIn the first week of the Faculty of Medicine, my cohort was divided into small groups, given large sheets of white paper and assigned the task of drawing organs on a human outline, as our lecturer shouted “liver!”, “Ovary … Another ovary!”, “Annex!”, “Spleen!” It was surprising to face our ignorance and the exercise was formative to retain humility when we speak with patients and that I am curious about what I call their “imaginary anatomy”: how we think that our body looks like inside. Despite the smooth and thin cuts that we see on the walls of GP surgeries, each of us has this imaginary space which interests not only its gap in relation to the manual of “truth”, but because the idea of ​​our entrails affects what we feel for ourselves and what we think that our body can do for us. This could explain why I chose to become a psychiatrist rather than a surgeon.
As Gabriel Weston writes AliveSurgeons tend to think that they “have an anatomy”. Weston is itself a rare surgeon race, having read English at the University of Edinburgh before counting with its only level of biology to join a new course for students in the humanities who wanted to become doctors. This made her “the least qualified medical student in the country”. His “soft brain and lover of the arts” had to pass as a scientist – a foreign status that I share – which has become easier once Weston has become fascinated by the operational theater and the “fishing slit” of the opening incision of the scalpel. It is an obsession that is still obvious everywhere in his writing. But she has never lost her conviction that medicine is dangerously resistant to seeing the body as more than the mechanism, the person as more than a case.
After having become an ENT specialist (ear, nose and throat), Weston came out of full -time training to present the BBC Two Believe me, I’m a doctor and wrote an acclaimed thesis, Direct Red: the story of a surgeon (2009), as well as a novel, Dirt (2013). Alive was a decade in the manufacture, shaped by the “human prism” of aging, giving birth to and raising twins at 43, sudden bleeding in the brain of his son and his own illness, first detected as a whisper by his boyfriend in medicine in their twenties (diagnosis by peers while practicing with stethoscopes is not uncommon).
Compared to the dynamism and the rhythm of discovery in physiology and pharmacology, anatomy may seem inert, bloodless, installed. This is a subject that tends to be taught through dissected specimens and bones smoothed by hundreds of hands. Anatomy literally means “cutting” the body, and AliveThe chapters of the organ do it of the organ, defying the wisdom inherited from each with a feminist eye. Weston reminds us that fear is surely the right answer when you consider the intestine as “the largest sensory organ” in constant communion with the microbiota living in it, the kidneys rinsed with 200 liters of liquid in a tower of the earth axis and the nipples of an infant of girls capable of producing milk in response to the maternal escène of its first moments in the world.
The bodies become more alive for us as they go wrong. “Health is life lived in the silence of the organs,” wrote the French vascular surgeon René Leriche in 1936; If the chance to be exempt from pain and other disabling symptoms, our body may feel strangely dead. Reading Weston is like a series of cuts to life: the subcutaneous fat is “yellow of pastry cream”, the brain is a “soft organ inside a tight box” and its dubious mitral valve is “like the oscillating doors in a living room after a cowboy has made its sighted entry”. His prose is admirably clean and intelligent, but not to the detriment of tenderness, and fortunately avoids the sentimentality which infiltrates too often in medical non-fiction.
“Why are we so ready to waste pleasure in the way we teach anatomy?” Weston asks, an approach that changes women in particular. Knowledge of the genitals needs a “rewriting”, she says: the clitoris, rather than the “conduit” of the vagina, is the true counterpart of the penis, but as female desire has become pathologized by victorians, the clitoris was rubbed. We have the Australian urologist Helen O’Connell to thank for finally having mapped the extended innervation of the clitoris in 2005 (!) To help surgeons to preserve his sensitivity. Many are deceived by the small size of the visible clitoral hood, and Weston despairs that we are too hooked on what our bodies look like, rather than what they feel. Silicone breast implants undermine their erogenous environment, and the first extension of the breast in 1962 was made on an indifferent woman in exchange for the surgeon pinning her ears.
Half of the British cannot mark or describe the female genitals. You could say – and Weston the fact – that the expertise on the sensations of the body from the inside and the tips of our fingers is a more important form of knowledge. But high levels of sexual dissatisfaction reported by women do not suggest higher levels of expertise.
Clinical practice is stubbornly faithful to pets. “In a sphere learned like medicine, it is easy to assume that false ideas will be quickly replaced by real,” writes Weston, but it’s far from being true. The compliance of doctors – Hello, rules of rules and lovers of guidelines – is essential to make health care reliable and safe. But it also includes risks. The chance to survive cardiac arrest in the community, receiving gold treatment and returning home is half more likely for women than for men.
This is partly due to a remarkable lack of curiosity and consciousness of the biological differences of the female heart and the cardiological impact of circulating hormones, but also thanks to the way women are ready to think of themselves (“Are these not mainly men of average age who obtain heart attacks?
Weston rightly loses patience with “protocols that claim to suit all bodies, when most of the data on which they are based are taken from white male patients”. The change is based on people pushing against the heavy door of tradition – which Alive We are brilliantly persuades to make more strength – find new ways to imagine and live in space under our skin.
Kate Womersley is a doctor and a academic specializing in psychiatry
