Gratitude and contempt

I am back: minus a cancerous bladder, minus 30 lbs bodyweight, and minus distressing amounts of time (unexpected complications and a second operation); but my cancer is gone, I am alive, and about to start kicking. First, let me take this opportunity to express my deepest thanks for the veritable mountain of get-well cards, flowers, telegrams, and letters of encouragement. I was moved by every one of them, and I genuinely regret that I could not reply to each individually.

To whom do I owe my cancer cure?

To men like William T.G. Morton (1819-68) and Horace Wells (1815-48), pioneers of anesthesia, who faced stiff opposition to their claims and demonstrations that the body could be deadened to pain by certain chemicals. The predecessors of Jeremy Rifkin and Professor George Wald opposed this unknown method, preferring to perform surgery after making the patient drunk, and if necessary clubbing him over the head. Even when anesthetics began to be accepted, doctors used them very selectively, and often only for major operations, for they believed that a patient's ability to endure pain aided in the process of recovery.(1) Yet science eventually prevailed over superstition, even if too late to gratify Morton and Wells, both American dentists: the former died embittered and impoverished, the latter, failing to make his case, was driven to suicide.

I owe my cure to men like Joseph Lister (1827-1912), the founder of antiseptic surgery. The boon in surgery following the discovery of anesthesia was offset by the scourge of sepsis; no hospital was free of "hospital fever" or "hospital gangrene," and the mortality after amputations was between 40 and 60%.(2) Lister caused a revolution by destroying microorganisms in the wound and the adjacent air by carbolic acid. This time there is no need to say "the predecessors of," for the benighted zealots opposing efficient sterilization are still among us. The wonderful and varied properties of plastics could not be fully applied in medicine if only heat (which would damage the plastic) could be used to sterilize them. Fortunately there is the cold and efficient sterilization by gamma rays; but that makes the dunces scream Hiroshima, hell and holocaust.

The dunces of Mine Hill, N.J., for example, still sit on the city council to which they got themselves elected by painting the horrors of having such a sterilization facility in town, and who passed an ordinance prohibiting all sources of ionizing radiation, forgetting to exempt their own blood. Gloria in excelsis to rot, sepsis and infection, they presumably intone as they dance round the witches' cauldron; eternal damnation to cleanliness and radioactivity.

It is an old and never-ending story: science and reason eventually prevail over cant and superstition, but only in a heart-rendingly slow struggle. Perhaps the only new element of our age is that the Rifkins, Walds, Cochranes and Ehrlichs, marching backward step-instep with cholera and cancer, call themselves "progressives."

But then, in no age did the reactionaries call themselves reactionaries; they always had some high-minded facade to hide behind.

And, glory be, they always ended up as losers.

1. M.S. Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in 19^th-Century America, Columbia Univ. Press, 1994.

2. A Biographical Dictionary of Scientists, Wiley, 1969.