A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

impelled pioneer neurosurgeons to go on a cutting, sawing, and
drilling campaign that killed virtually the first one thousand
patients on the table. They were in such misery that taking their
lives away, or their ability to think, or speak, or smile, or move,
did not seem so unbearable a risk.
Much has been written about the hubristic attitude required to
make an initial incision in another human being. Take that hubris
and then quadruple it and know that you’re going in where no one
has gone before, and that your first hundred patients died the
instant you opened them up, and you have an idea what these
surgeons were made of.
Like Civil War generals, they shed the blood of many, and
besplotched their own immediate reputations, to create leverage
for the future. Those doctors' patients died on the table so that my
neurosurgeon’s patients today could get operated on and survive.
And do I imagine that, at the end of each day, these doctors
felt guilty? And how. In that sense, their psychological complex
leaves God’s in the dust. God can revel in his omnipotence and
omniscience because he is, after all, omnipotent and omniscient.
Like Superman, he never pays the price for his powers.
"Victor, if you operate on that man, he will die," a neurologist
said to the turn-of-the-century brain surgeon Victor Horsley, who
used to perform brain surgery in his patients' parlors. "Of course
he will die," Horsely replied, "but if I do not persist, those who
come after me will do no better."
Another surgeon, Harvey Cushing, performed an operation
on Maj. General Leonard Wood, a military pal of Teddy
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