Locate Mercy

You cannot separate passion from pathology.

No matter how many books you love, only one or two will love you back. To reread Richard Selzer’s Letters to a Young Surgeon is to remind myself that I believe in synchronicity, and that when you are in extremis, when you have exhausted every resource, there is a book somewhere that will reteach you what you already know: that you can reverse the breaking and begin to knit your sundered parts. And it is always possible that such a book will come to your hand as Selzer came to mine. A book that cups your face in its hands and looks at you softly, eye to eye, at human distance.

Selzer, surgeon-turned-writer, frames this collection of essays as a one-way correspondence addressed to a novice of whom the writer is very fond. The tone is intimate, and the letters are about intimacy—the relationship of surgeon to his patient: to Selzer, a matter of awe. “The body,” he says, “is the spirit thickened.”

It is about the instruments of surgery, and the body itself—gallstones and wens and wounds and tumors—its beauty and ugliness—but more than that, anything about the human bond between the doctor and the wounded patient, a relationship Selzer understands as holy. The Latinate language of medicine is precise and rich. He loves the book and the word. Though he never gives explicit advice about writing, he might as well have titled the collection Letters to a Young Writer and Editor. Read Letters and test his prescriptions by substituting yourself—as reader, writer, or editor—for “surgeon” or “doctor.” Think of the body of the work you’re making or reading or editing as the physical body. “[A] physical examination affords the opportunity to touch your patient. It gives the patient to be touched by you. In this exchange, messages are sent from one to the other.” It is a book about reciprocal bonds and responsibility: about compassion. Editors, I think, should have to take the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm.

Any reader/writer (our left and right of the same human animal, aspects we can’t separate “any more than you can separate a person’s body from his spirit”) is likely to find something of use in these essays; the lessons, being metaphoric, are wonderfully portable. He’ll help you keep in mind that revision and editing of your own and others’ work requires listening, as, diagnosing, a good doctor puts her ear to a patient’s chest. The body of such work—often wounded—is as vulnerable as any naked patient exposed to the knife. The book can realign you, ease and open the jammed spaces between your joints to keep you flexible, adjust your mental posture, and moderate your textual rigidities. To consider the kind of reader and writer and editor, the kind of human being you want to be, “Listen to the patient,” Selzer says, quoting Sir William Osler. “He is trying to tell you what is the matter with him.”

I don’t promise that Selzer will love you, too. Or heal you, or take out your gallstones, or clip your ingrown toenails, or sew up your wounds. He might help you heal your sentences. But he will help you think about how to be the kind of human being, reader, writer, and editor you want to be.

Letters to a Young Doctor was originally given to me by David. At one time, as one of the few people among my friends who had a stable address, I had run something like a depression-era boarding house: if you were cold or hungry or just at loose ends, you could use the shower, get a bowl of chili, and crash on the couch for a couple of days. When I got off my waitress job at 3 a.m., friends and bar regulars and whoever they picked up would drift in: late-shift GM guys, fry cooks, demobbed vets and poets, and one out-of-work physicist—whoever had just drifted into town or was between one place and...