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Resistance Thomas Haley IdeaUy a surgeon's scalpel is sharpened to such a degree that the epidermal layers it slices through wfll offer no resistance. Bone saws and medical drflls are fine-tuned so that they sink easily into patients' bodies with minimal effort; the whirring bit should penetrate an anesthetized skuU as easily as a chopstick does unset strawberryJeU-O. Hence, you wfll seldom hear a surgeon suggesting to a medical student: "Harrison, you need to give that a bit more elbow grease." The work of a surgeon is in this way very different from how we conduct ourselves from day to day. We move with a constant faith in physical resistance. Have you noticed this? You can hold onto a newspaper or book only because your fingers teU you when to stop pressing and when to press harder; your digits know from this resistance that there's something caught tightly between them. When we walk, we feel the floor hit our heels and we stop pushing our feet downward. Ifyou have ever gotten out of bed in the middle ofthe night with numb legs and a pressing need to urinate, then you have probably tried walking without feeUng this familiar floor pressure and you have experienced the resulting difficulty ofmovement and embarrassing performance. At the movie theater yesterday, for instance, I sat with my legs crossed for a long time, and when I tried to lower my leg back to a traditional footdown position, I found that I had lost control of the entire limb. EventuaUy just before the pin-prickkng set in, I was able to uncross the leg and move it down toward the floor, but I made sure to watch my foot, UteraUy to watch it and stop moving it when I saw that it had reached the floor. I feared that if I didn't work by sight, that if I simply let the numb foot drop where it may, or worse yet if I unwittingly pressed my foot to the floor with more force than necessary that I would bust an ankle. It was Uke having been to the dentist and then having to be very careful not to chew through your numb cheek 34 Thomas Haley35 or bite offyour tongue. I have been to the dentist many times, and know that an accident Uke this can happen in a single, bloody, oblivious second. Surgeons receive hefty paychecks because, in the hands ofyou or me, a scalpel's lack of physical resistance would result in tragedy and disgusting messes. Even the minor damage we would incur from a lack of opposing force is startling to consider. People would not know when they were pressing their toothbrushes hard enough against their teeth to get the job done, and would overcompensate and ruin dental work. Piano and computer keyboards would be destroyed in a matter of hours, as would aU kinds of buttons on aU kinds of expensive and important equipment. We stop pushing because the button has told our fingertips that it has moved far enough. Resistance teUs us the task is accomplished: the elevator is coming, the tape is playing, the phone is phoning. A properly sharpened scalpel aUows the surgeon no such cautionary pressure ; it stops moving only when the doctor stops it, and it is this attribute of the scalpel and I think only this attribute of the scalpel that makes it similar to a CaterpiUar D8 buUdozer. Like a surgical tool, the Caterpfllar has been manufactured in such a way that it necessitates the operator's working primarily by sight, rather than by the sensations of resistance. I know this because one day, during the summer I worked for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and spent long hot hours with rugged Appalachian men in the dense hflly woods of Zaleski State Forest, I drove one. I met a couple offorestry students from nearby Hocking Technical CoUege while I worked at Zaleski, and was impressed and humbled by their subde knowledge ofthings in the woods and in the equipment garages ofthe forest headquarters. My major in English was doing me no good there, and I tried to avoid talking about...

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