All, or Nothing at All (Body Parts)

I have just finished reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1898 short story “The Brown Hand.” (Reprinted in The Captain of the Pole Star: Weird and Imaginative Fiction, a beautiful book by Ash-Tree Press, not to be confused with the less comprehensive collection published under the same name in Doyle’s lifetime.) The story concerns a retired doctor haunted by the apparition of a man whose hand he had amputated. If the idea of an Earth-bound spirit in search of a missing body part seems familiar, you’ve probably seen it elsewhere. The device was hardly new even in Conan Doyle’s time.

A century and a half earlier, before the idea of custodial punishment really caught on, the threat of dissection was used to deter crime in England and elsewhere. In the 1700’s, virtually everything was a hanging offence, including petty theft and adultery. The murder act of 1752 turned the remains of the most heinous criminals over to London’s anatomy schools, which had few legal ways to obtain specimens. (The illegal ones included grave robbing, and in one famous instance, murder.) Fights beneath the gallows between anatomists and families of the condemned were commonplace. What motivated the deceased’s defenders was not the nastiness of dissection, but a firm belief that the body had to be buried whole. In those days, Christians of all stripes believed in a physical resurrection on Judgment Day. Gabriel would blow his horn and we would all sit up in our graves. Your recently executed Uncle Steve would be needing his body again. All of it.

The notion raises all sorts of questions. Uncle Steve murdered someone, first of all. What are the odds of his getting past old Gabe? What’s a few missing organs compared to the Mark of Cain? Second, what does Gabe care what Steve looks like? Gabe’s not manning the velvet rope at a nightclub, after all. Third, surely somebody in Heaven can fix up Steve’s mutilated bits. What, is Jesus too busy? And hey, doesn’t everybody, you know, decompose anyway?

A quarter of a millennium later, in our more enlightened times, surely no one believes such nonsense.

Right?

Actually, Judaism requires that bodies be buried as quickly as possible, with all pieces present. (Cremation is frowned upon, as are tattoos, oddly.) The Muslim faith demands the same. So do many other Eastern religions, as in the Doyle story. Even the Catholic Church is surprisingly picky about body parts, especially those of its Popes. A recent traveling exhibition displayed papal reliquaries, essentially fancy jars housing bits various Popes lost during their lives. These would, in theory at least, be buried with the Pope when he died. When Pope John Paul the Second was shot, the length of intestine removed during surgery was preserved.

Popes aside, how do whole body purists fare in our modern world? Not so good, actually. The enemy is no longer anatomy schools, but proper sanitation. In the U.S. and other first world countries, all scrap tissue and other “medical waste” must be disposed of quickly and safely. In practice, the bits cut out of you during surgery are put in a little bin, the contents of which are later dumped into a bigger bin full of a bunch of other people’s leavings. These are incinerated, cremated essentially, either by the hospital itself or a medical waste disposal service.

What happens to these mixed ashes? I’ve never been able to find out. All the websites for medical waste disposal firms that I’ve visited, while they emphasize the thoroughness of their “inventory control,” pass without comment over this issue. No one who might know what happens to the ashes has ever been willing to speak to me about it. Still, one point is clear. Once something’s been cut out of you at the hospital, it’s gone.

Personally, I’m more worried about curio collectors. Between my congenital abnormalities and my extensive surgical history, my heart is rather unusual, maybe even unique. Cut out of my corpse and polymerized, it would make a great teaching tool or a striking paperweight. Wait a minute. I think I feel a story coming on. It concerns a cardiac surgeon haunted by the apparition of a former patient. What do you think?

David Hurwitz

What does it feel like when your heart stops?

Writers need to know a lot of weird shit. When you write horror, the shit you need to know is just naturally a bit weirder. So, in the spirit of mutual assistance, I offer the answer to the above question to my fellow horror hacks.

I know what you’re thinking. That’s nice, Dave, but how do know what it feels like when your heart stops? Isn’t that usually, like, fatal?

In point of fact, I have had my heart stopped several times, all for medical purposes and all under supervised conditions. I’ve actually lost count of the specific number of times. Most of these little vacations for my circulatory system took place during heart surgery, with machines picking up the slack. Obviously, I was unconscious for those.

I even had my heart stopped with the paddles once. At one time, I suffered from rapid heart arrhythmia. Stopping the heart and starting it again can trick it into beating normally, not unlike rebooting your computer. Sadly, I don’t remember what the shock itself feels like. The ER docs slipped me something which permanently erased about five minutes from my brain. I still remember how sore I felt afterward, like I’d been kicked and beaten, but without the bruising. If I’d had any gambling debts, I would have paid them.

The incident I have in mind occurred around the same time and for the same reasons. Instead of the paddles, which are actually fairly dangerous for someone with my surgical history, the ER docs used drugs this time.

My first sensation was actually one of profound relief. Rapid heart arrhythmia feels terrible, like your body is running at top speed for hours on end, even when you’re sitting, even while you sleep. Now the runner stopped, sat down on the ground, and took a few deep breaths. The rest was wonderful. I tried to take a few deep breaths myself. That was much more difficult than it should have been.

I don’t know if you are aware of your own heartbeat, but several weeks of rhythm trouble had taught me to be alert for changes. I waited, breathing shallowly, for the familiar pulse to start again. Nothing happened. The hollow silence in my chest went on and on. The world began to change.

My peripheral vision dimmed down to a hazy black tunnel as the blood left my head. The space immediately before me became a hot blur. A vast rushing sound filled my ears, like a high wind, like a subway train approaching at a furious speed, pushing the air before it.

“Try to breath normally,” the doctor said, and it sounded as though he was shouting at the bottom of a pool. I found myself shaking, hyperventilating, seriously panicked. The black at the edges of my vision spread inward, and I lost all sensation of my body.

Then my heart beat once. Then nothing. Again. Then nothing. Two beats, three beats, four, irregularly spaced and without pattern. Then it was like an engine caught.

My sight returned, washing back in pixilated smudges. When my vision cleared completely, I saw that the doctor was holding the defibrillator paddles. His face had gone white. My wife, who was present through all of this, claims that I laughed and muttered “Tunnel of light.”

From a treatment standpoint, the whole ordeal was a bust. My heart beat just as fast as before, once it restarted. Still, it’s given me plenty to think about over the years. Looking back, the weirdest part of the experience by far was the minute or so I sat there feeling fine and dandy. Death, in and of itself, didn’t really seem to hurt much. I can also see why many people give a religious significance to the physiological sensations of dying. Tunnel of light, indeed.

David Hurwitz