The Resurrectionist The Lost Work of Dr. - By E. B. Hudspeth Page 0,2

parents, both of whom are now gone. My mother died delivering birth to me while my father attended. He held my life in one hand and her death in the other. He did not often speak of her.

It was in the winter of my sixteenth year when my father succumbed to smallpox: a disease that took his life. I am certain that I mourned my father’s death; however, I did not weep.

As he lay in his coffin, I thought he may likely rise again. He may come out of the hole, bundled in rags by unknown men with faces obscured by darkness and soot or ash. He would then be dragged down the path and loaded into a cart. A few seconds would pass, then the reigns would snap and the horse would carry him away. My father was a well-known and respected doctor and anatomist. He certainly paid for many corpses for his research; now he too may serve science yet again.

When one dies they neither ascend to the heavens nor descend to hell, they instead become cured—freed from an illness and healed from the suffering of mortality. Our consciousness, our awareness, is a symptom of our body and it is secondary to the mystery of our physical chemistry. It is in this sincere application to biology where I promise to excel as a scientist of medicine. The entire body is the soul, and my knife cuts deep into the flesh; I vow to be always reverent with the edge of my scalpel.

Spencer Black excelled at the Academy of Medicine. It was evident to both his peers and his teachers that he would soon be a fledgling practitioner in the medical arts. Noted for being extremely serious and clever for his age, Spencer made a name for himself as one of the most promising prodigies in the country. Bernard’s interests were quite different: he had decided to focus his work on the natural sciences, fossils, and history.

One of Spencer’s most influential professors was Joseph Warren Denkel, a Scottish immigrant who first studied at the Medical Arts College of Boston, where he met Spencer’s father as a fellow student. He later worked as a field surgeon during the Civil War, performing hundreds of amputations; many of these resulted in death by infection. At Philadelphia’s Academy of Medicine, Denkel was perceived as a charismatic physician, often jocular with staff and patients, prone to gambling and other raucous behavior in the evenings. He and Spencer Black became good friends.

During this time in American medicine great and dramatic changes were occurring rapidly throughout not only this country but the world as well. Physicians were beginning to understand bacteria and its role in infection. Sanitation practices were improving. The practice of washing hands or dipping them in carbolic acid was increasingly common, replacing older notions that dried blood on surgeons’ hands acted as a sanitary barrier or that sanitation had no correlation to infection during surgery. The introduction of anesthesia revolutionized surgery; it allowed the surgeon more time to perform the work without worrying about the patient’s pain. Black welcomed these advancements and was excited about contributing ideas of his own.

During his first year at the academy, in 1869, Black began to research mutations of the body—specifically, physical abnormalities that manifest in dramatic, unique, and even fatal ways. However, studying people maligned with these conditions was not easy. They often died early or were difficult to find because they were secluded from the public. Much of Black’s early work was influenced by his experiences at the Grossemier Museum in downtown Philadelphia. In the museum’s collection was a famously peculiar skeleton of parapagus dicephalus dibrachius (conjoined twins); the skeleton was named Ella and Emily; the girls had died at birth. He wrote his first paper about their unfortunate condition. The result was highly praised but not well distributed; much of Black’s work was considered less worthy of discussion than the research of infectious diseases, more efficient surgical practice, or improved anesthesia. Many thought the young doctor was wasting his time on birth defects. Black wrote about some of his frustrations during that time:

I am engrossed in anatomical research now. Denkel is assisting my efforts despite what other professors have called, “unnecessary and fruitless interests in mutations of the body.” He is either ignorant of their counsel or genuinely interested in my research—I tend to think it’s the latter.

The miracle of life is granted, and how that miracle can be defective is a nuance that I