Word: selzer
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...over her face. She was accompanied by Mexican Ambassador Ricardo Galan, representing the prisoners. All three men, with Latin chivalry, gallantly stood aside to allow the hooded woman to enter first. After two hours and 20 minutes of secret talks, there were signs of some progress. Austrian Ambassador Edgar Selzer was released and flew off to Vienna to be at the bedside of his dying wife...
...Selzer is hardly the first M.D. to ruminate about the scalpel. Rabelais, Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Celine, and more recently William Nolen have written moving accounts of their medical careers. But few have examined the surgical art with such fervor and concern. Some doctors deplore the body's limitations; Selzer celebrates them. "It is the flesh alone that counts," he begins. "In the recesses of the body I search for the philosopher's stone...
...author's prose style is some times clouded by a purple hue, but his in sights are as clear as those in Lewis Thomas' Lives of a Cell. In one chapter Selzer defines the heart as "purest theatre . . . throbbing in its cage palpably as any nightingale. It quickens in response to our emotions. And all the while we feel it, hear it, even - we, its stage and its audience." The liver is that "great maroon snail," of whose existence one is hardly aware until it malfunctions. "No wave of emotion sweeps it. Neither music nor mathematics gives...
...Selzer, a faculty member at the Yale University Medical School, can be entertaining, even whimsical, when he discusses baldness or Homo sapiens' his toric love affair with alcohol. But there is no drollery in his discussions of life's end. Like a man describing an old colleague, Selzer watches death at work. "You do not die all at once," observes the surgeon. "Some tissues live on for minutes, even hours, giving still their little cellular shrieks, molecular echoes of the agony of the whole corpus . . . There are outposts where clusters of cells yet shine, besieged, little lights blinking...
...more elusive thing that theologians call the soul. He recognizes, ultimately, that the Grail he seeks is less likely to be found in floodlit operating rooms than in the darkness of the mind. "It is not the surgeon who is God's darling," concludes Selzer. "It is the poet who heals with his words, stanches the flow of blood, stills the rattling breath, applies poultice to the scalded flesh...