Word: scalpeled
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Today's top-responsibility middle-ager might say with Shakespeare's Henry V at dawn of the Battle of Agincourt: "The day, my friends, and all things wait for me." Whether the hand holds the scalpel (Dr. Michael DeBakey, 57) or the baton (Leonard Bernstein, 48), it is watched by patient and public with rapt attention. Whether he is a Protestant evangelist (Billy Graham, 47) or a Catholic Archbishop (John Patrick Cody, 58, of Chicago, a U.S. cardinal-to-be), he lends spiritual guidance to attending multitudes. Whether he is a master of industry (Arjay Miller, 50, president...
...noisy antiseptic indignity of life in a hospital ward. Patients are frenzied or conniving; doctors hearty and indifferent. Drifting in and out of fantasies, he plods a painful path from demi-death to limited life. Welch's perceptions are keen, and his imagery probes reality like a scalpel. A nurse's face "gained an unreal nutcracker severity from the curve and compression of her nose and lips. It was as if a heavy weight on her head had crumpled the features underneath." Railroad tracks, "like never-ending stilettos, seemed to pierce into the grey, veined, bulging heart...
With that, "Balaguer launched into the first public details of his program to rebuild the tired, war-shattered nation. "The first step in this direction," he said, "must consist of an austerity policy which will act not as a bomb, but as a scalpel upon the ulcers that must be cut out in cold blood." The ulcers - inflation, corruption, political favoritism and inefficiency - would not disappear easily, Balaguer warned, and his surgery would be "painful...
...Raymond G. Wilmer, 47, a housewife in the Cleveland suburb of Parma, had a mitral valve so scarred from rheumatic fever that it did not let enough blood flow from the left auricle into the left ventricle. Often such valves can be repaired with a deft scalpel: many are now replaced with artificial valves. But Mrs. Wilmer's valve was too damaged for repair, and scarring left no room for an artificial implant...
...Viet Cong have based their political campaign on the assassination of thousands of tax-collectors and government officials. William Tuohy described in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine how "Viet Cong terror is bloodthirsty, but selective. It is a scalpel, not a hammer. It is aimed at the leaders. In three years they drove out 50 per cent of the Vietnames leaders from the countryside." The selectivity of Communist terrorism often gets distorted by American propaganda; surely a decapitated tax-collector in the village square inspires more loyalty and enthusiasm than fear for the Communists...