Mary Roach - Six Feet Over

My favorite being “The Anesthetized Patient Can Hear and Can Remember ,” from a 1962 Journal of Proctology article. “Their physiologic adaptations to the stress of surgery may be profoundly disturbed by what they hear,” wrote the author, leading me to mistake him for a caring physician. Then he went on: “Medico-legal implications are obvious even if we do not care about the patient.” I sat there blinking in disbelief. I did this again twelve pages later, upon seeing the emblem of the International Academy of Proctology: a double-snake caduceus with a free-floating length of rectum standing in for the pole.

In checking the spelling of “Kimberly-Clark” on the web, I note that the personal hygiene empire has expanded well beyond sanitary napkins. It’s a global powerhouse spewing forth multiple brands of diapers, adult diapers, disposable training pants, bed-wetting underpants, “flushable moist wipe products,” award-winning disposable swim pants, and “cloth-like towels strong enough for big messes,” though probably not the big mess of umpteen billion used disposable hygiene products.

There is, of course, disagreement as to whether they are actually traveling somewhere or simply experiencing a vivid hallucination; a good discussion of this can be found in the Skeptical Inquirer article by Susan Blackmore listed in the bibliography. Blackmore, a parapsychologist turned skeptic, has had out-of-body experiences of her own, which you can read about on the website of TASTE, The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences.

That is, in the near-death journals. You can find them in certain fundamentalist Christian publications. I read that in the February 1990 issue of the Trinity Broadcasting Network newsletter Praise the Lord , there’s an article about scientists drilling in Siberia and suddenly poking through to a hollow space from which issued screams and temperatures in excess of two thousand degrees. I spoke to a woman in the newsletter department at TBN, who apologized for not being able to send out pre-2003 back issues. “We disregard them every year,” she explained confusingly. “We shred them.”

And now I must reveal to you that Wes is not a defibrillator insertion patient in Charlottesville, but in San Francisco, near where I live. The human subjects committee for Greyson’s study would not allow me in the operating room. So I called UCSF Medical Center, who kindly let me observe an insertion. My apologies to the reader, and my thanks to UCSF Medical Center (number six on U.S. News & World Report’s 2004 list of the nation’s best hospitals). And to the unconscious Wes, who later wrote and apologized for “not having been more sociable.”

$345

Incredibly, Victorian physicians practiced gynecology and urology on women without looking. Even something as tricky as a catheter insertion would typically be done blind, with the doctor’s hands under the sheets and his gaze heading off in some polite middle distance. Fortunately, budding MDs were allowed to look upon — and rehearse upon — cadaver genitals, and that is how they learned to practice the Braille edition of their craft.

They don’t mean to tidy up afterwards.

FYI, it’s the newest use for Botox. Because what paralyzes your frowning muscles will just as effectively paralyze your clamping vagina muscles.