Body and Soul

Flesh in the Age of Reason

The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul

by Roy Porter

W.W. Norton, 660 pp., $29.95

NEAR THE FIRST OF THE YEAR, I found myself on a long weekend in Buffalo, New York--staying, as I joked at the time, at the One Seasons Hotel--when I noted a throbbing in my left thumb. I thought that I had perhaps bruised the thumb without realizing it at the time. As the weekend progressed it grew more swollen and redder, the throbbing greater.

Preferring not to rush off to a doctor, I thought I might await the cessation of what seemed at best a negligible problem. Back in Chicago, so great did the throbbing become that I felt I wouldn't be able to sleep under its insistent pressure, and so, it being early evening, I didn't call our family physician, but took myself to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.

There the triage nurse noted the appearance of red lines running up my left forearm, which meant that infection had set in. When, roughly three hours later, I saw a young emergency-room physician, he lanced the thumb through the nail, out of which a pearl-size bead of pus oozed. Because I happened to be taking a very small dosage of the drug Prednisone, the infection put my immune system in jeopardy, and he felt that I must spend the night in the hospital lashed to an IV dripping antibiotics into my bloodstream.

Had I waited another day or so before coming into the hospital, this doctor said, I might have been in serious trouble. He then told me of a woman he had under care who had what she thought a pimple on her bottom that turned out to be a flesh-eating strep that, having been neglected, landed her in intensive care, where she was, at the moment, fighting to remain alive.

Swollen thumbs, harmless-seeming pimples, diseases arcane and common, many with no known cause or cure, not to speak of cancers just beginning to go on the boil and exotic new deadly diseases freshly revealed almost monthly, the wondrous machine that is the human body is also, when one thinks about it, frightfully fragile.

Best not to think too much about it, my own nonscientific view has long been. The older one gets, of course, the less one is able to achieve this fine state of deliberate indifference. Things fall apart, parts wear out, subtractions--in the realms of teeth, hair, strength, coordination--seem relentless. Just when the wisdom earned through experience ought to kick in, the body kicks not back but out. Not so fast, friend, it declares, you're my prisoner, imprisoned in your own slowly but inexorably rotting flesh, and with no hope for parole in sight.

WHAT IS WORSE, the body often acts as if it is in business for itself. The state of one's body affects one's mind more often than the other way round. Not mind over matter, but matter over mind, generally seems the order of the day. "It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists," Miguel de Unamuno writes, "But it is our optimism or our pessimism, a physiological or perhaps pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas."

Our greatest efforts at physical control frequently come to naught: causing us to twitch, tremble, blush, weep, lose consciousness despite our strongest will to do otherwise. Organs, glands, and intestines go about their solemn work, requiring micturition, flatulation, defecation, ejaculation, belching, burping, yawning, and hiccuping--while in the engine room (as one would like to think of the mind) one is earnestly trying to determine, say, why there have been no major poets born after 1900. I recently read about Hermann Jellinek, a revolutionary about to be executed by hanging in Vienna during the revolution of 1848, who remarked: "My spirit is calm. I hope my body will not play tricks with me." Alas, it probably did, since at the point of hanging, I have read, all sphincteral control is lost.

The issue at the center of the body-mind problem is which of the two, body or mind, is supreme, which is at the wheel, which is really in possession of the remote and selecting all the channels? The answer has never been clear. Contemplation of the world's most powerful ideals or magnificent works of art cannot relieve the pain of a toothache. Neither is enduring pain likely to make one wiser. Considerations of the mind-body problem usually end in a cat's game.