Anatomy Lesson

Doctor Norris flaunts a picture of himself in the Key West Citizen on his office furniture, alongside all those other bits of paper doctors accumulate during the course of a career- diplomas, certificates and Rotary Club encouragements to do good. In the waiting room where I sat while waiting to get my expiring shingles examined one more time, there lies my favorite book:It's a big floppy tome that has apparently been around for a while, and I expect will be around for a while longer as humans aren't going to change that much in the foreseeable future.While waiting I like to flip through the book and try to come up with some confounding diagnosis before the doctor gets into the room. "Yes, I think I may be suffering from an impacted esophagealic sprung splangefusket in the lower anterior nerve endings." " Very good," says the unflappable doctor, setting the book aside "let's have a look at those shingles."After we had established my blisters were gone and all that was left was a burning sensation round my waist I got to ask about the book. "This picture," Doctor Norris said, "shows how we evolved from fish. Look at the lines of the nerves, see how they coil round."

We started as worms and then as the flippers developed the nerves traced spirals around our body. "The blue on the arms and the purple on the feet look like flippers."

I stared at the pictures and it was at this moment perhaps that I got a glimpse of how little I know. I have never had reason to doubt Darwin's On the Origin of Species, even though I tried to read it once and found it as dry as chalk dust and just as illegible. I am reliably informed millions of people do doubt evolutionary theory and I wondered upon what they base their distrust. The more I learn the more obvious it seems, not that I have ever had reason to doubt evolutionary theory. I don't doubt the reality of Relativity Theory either, though most of it goes way over my head. Dr Norris worked at a teaching hospital Up North and it shows because he has a remarkable capacity to explain the most impenetrable medical knowledge. I really like having to go and see him, I always learn something.The anatomy book laid out the human body just as one would lay out an electronics schematic or a parts diagram for a motorcycle. How little do I know, I thought to myself as I idly flipped the pages of the book. What seems obvious to a human educated in the sciences seems so remote and abstract in a world where newspapers dumb down their language to maintain the interest of a reading public with the attention span of a ten year old. There was a photograph of the author making his painstaking drawings of us as we are underneath our skin:I liked this one the best, it makes us look like sides of beef, the marbled fat on the right hand side, the barbecue ribs on the left.

I suppose once we accept the physical-ness of our being, all those thoughts that flit behind our eyeballs, all those emotions that spark in our heads become part of the machine. No more and no less.

I managed to have my own bit of fun when I signed in to see the Doctor. "Er, sir," the sweet young receptionist hung out of her cubicle holding my sign-in sheet. "What is this date?" she asked, looking at my signature next to the word Date:___ "Thanks," I replied, "I don't need a date. I'm married." She giggled and withdrew. I wondered what she'd make of my notation that my main complaint was lack of health care reform. We may just be sides of beef on our hind legs, but there's no proscription against having a bit of fun before we go to the knacker's yard.