Fate and the Doctor

In Which Elements Alien to Medicine Enter the Lives of Both Physician and Patient

FERENC MOLNÁR

AT a banquet given in honour of a composer friend of ours, 1 sat opposite a famous surgeon who was the most interesting doctor in pre-war Hungary. The surgeon was a lonely man, he lived only for his profession. There was only one tiling outside of surgery that interested him: music. 1 have often noticed this in surgeons. But I do not know whether it is a law, that surgeons have to he interested in music, or whether it is merely a tradition, since the great Billroth. Well, whatever it is, this banquet was one of the rare occasions when one could see the famous surgeon in evening dress.

At such dinners, as all of us know, the courses are the same for everybody. One either eats them or leaves them. I was surprised to see that the professor did not choose either of these possibilities; he was served with different dishes. He ate only soft food: boiled fish, mushrooms, eggs, pastry. I noticed that they brought him the special plates without any instructions; he must have arranged for all this in advance. As a matter of fact. I did not care much; I thought he followed some kind of dietary rules. But as the dinner progressed he noticed my interest. He turned to me, smiling:

"Do you notice what I eat?"

"Yes, I do," I answered. "Apparently dietetic dishes."

WELL, and what have you noticed? What is lacking in my dinner?" he asked me in the same tone of voice which he used when examining students at the University.

"I think, meat."

"No," he said. "Think for a second. What is missing?"

And he immediately answered his own question :

"A knife."

Indeed, I noticed only now that since he ate no solid dishes, he used no knife. He ate everything with spoon and fork.

"I have been doing this," he explained, "ever since a countess fainted at the table on my account. I rarely eat in company, I may even say, practical]\ never. Once 1 was forced to accept the invitation of a patient of mine, a former cabinet minister. The countess was sitting opposite me, just as you are now. Chicken was served. I ate just as I always had eaten. At least, I thought I did. Later, when the countess recovered from her faint, I discovered that I only thought I ate the way every well-bred person does eat. The countess told me that she became nervous the moment I took the knife in my hand. I could readily understand that. For the past thirty years I have been working with the knife from seven in the morning sometimes until after midnight. Although I do not notice it, others tell me that this is observable in the manner in which I hold the knife at the table. The countess told me that I dissected the chicken as I am accustomed to dissect delicate parts of the human body. She said she loved to watch people who eat beautifully. Especially difficult it is to cat chicken, pigeon or any kind of poultry aesthetically. But the precision with which I cut the chicken at the joints, the lightning-like sureness with which I separated the muscles from the tender little hones, had a horrible effect on her. She could not take her eyes off my hands; she was constantly reminded that 1 had gained this unheard of lightness of hand I so brilliantly displayed at the expense of a poor roast fowl by cutting human bodies into pieces. She could not go on watching my exhibition beyond the moment I lifted the first bite to my mouth. Then she went pale, leaned against the hack of the chair and fainted.

"And now comes the subjective side of the matter. For decades I had never thought while eating that I had had a knife in my hand. But, after this incident, the thought of the knife kept on troubling me. Old man that I was, I tried to recollect precisely how my mother had told me to hold the knife when eating meat. But, I confess, I have forgotten it. When I examine my students my first question is: 'Show me how you hold your knife.' Much can he deducted from the manner in which a surgeon holds his knife the moment he picks it up. And the special way of holding the knife designed to cut human bodies has now definitely ruined the good education I received at home. When I eat alone, or with my colleagues, I do not care. But when, very rarely, I happen to eat in company, I eat only such dishes as I may manipulate without the use of a knife. I am always afraid of the thoughts others at the table may have when they see the knife in my hand. Hence I eat boiled fish and scrambled eggs."

We began searching for analogies. Not the least interesting of our deductions was this one: How horrifying it must be for a great philosopher to use the same brains with which he is trying to establish a relationship between humankind and the Cosmos to perfect an argument in a quarrel with his wife. I suspect that the countess would swoon again at the thought.

§2

WHENEVER I think of the curious illness and death of Gaston, the impresario, I am disturbed and agitated again and again. It was a very strange story.

Gaston was an internationally known impresario. He supplied the Vienna and the Budapest Operas with Italian singers. In the summer, when the Operas were closed, he took his singers hack to Italy and toured the provinces with them. He was a healthy, wellfed little man, with a distinguished heard and a skull as hairless as a billiard ball. His eternally smiling, pink, happy face was known to the entire profession all over Europe.

I became a witness of the last, tragic period of his life quite by accident. I had been away on a lecture tour in Hungary and, on my way home, I boarded the Southern Express at Szekesfehervar, about two hours from Budapest. Gaston, coming from Italy, was in one of the compartments. But I hardly recognized him, he was so changed.

"Fve just left the hospital," he told me. "I am mortally ill. Something terrible happened to me."

And he told me his story.

He took a tenor of the Budapest Opera, famous not only for his voice hut also for his immense interest in alcoholic beverages, on an Italian tour. The singer was his discovery and he made much money from his appearances. The tenor sang in Milan first. His next concert was scheduled to take place in Genoa. The Milan train left around ten in the evening. At eight, the singer and Gaston went to the railroad station to dine. In those days the beautiful restaurant of the Milan station was world-famous for its cuisine and its excellent wines. At half past nine the tenor was so drunk that he created a scandal. Only Gaston's superhuman efforts prevented their being ejected from the restaurant. At a few minutes to ten the train arrived. But the tenor, dead drunk, refused to move from a place where they had such superb wines. He could not he persuaded to get on the train; he began to wrestle with Gaston on the platform. Then the impresario hoarded one of the coaches and attempted to haul the drunken singer up.

THE HE train began to pull out. Finally, the drunkard won, for he succeeded in dragging Gaston off the slowly moving train. Gaston desperately sent off a long telegram to Genoa: "On account of the tenor's indisposition, the first performance will not take place as announced." The train raced out into the night and near Genoa collided with another train. (I cannot exactly remember the date hut 1 am quite certain that it was one of the greatest railroad catastrophes in Italy, and I am positive that there were twenty-two dead among the casualties.) When Gaston read this in Milan the next morning—it was all over the front page of the Corriera della Sera,—he collapsed. He was taken to a hospital and he stayed there for several weeks. When he told me this story (a good many months after the unfortunate event) he became so pale and he trembled so frightfully in all his body that 1 begged of him to stop telling me about it. But he went on, nervously, I may say, maniacally. He even began to crv. He could not resign himself to the thought that had the drunken tenor not pulled him down by force from the already moving train, he would have been dead in a few hours.

For a while Gaston was treated at the Clinic of the Budapest University; then he visited one sanitarium after another. But, about a year after the catastrophe, lie died. He told me when we met on the train, after he recovered from his spasm of weeping, that his name was in the Big Book into which God had put down the names of all the victims of the Genoese train when He had picked them out, and that the fact that the drunken tenor had pulled him off the train could not change the roster in God's Book.