John Stone's twice-told secrets of a heart: "Cadaver" and "An Infected Heart".

The poet-cardiologist John Stone often draws upon on his medical experiences. Cases in point are "Cadaver," a poem, and "An Infected Heart," a prose sketch. Each can be considered a retelling of the other.

One need not choose between Stone's two literary treatments of the same experience with a corpse (actual or imagined). Rather, the poem and the prose piece, when juxtaposed, offer a rare opportunity to consider the dualistic sensibility of this writer-physician. Taken from The Smell of Matches, (John Stone, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1872): "Cadaver" reads:

   Fitting the labels
   in our books
   to our own tense tendons
   slipping in their sheaths

   we memorized the body
   and the word

   stripped the toughened skin
   from the stringing nerve
   the giving muscle.

   Ribs sprang like gates.

   In the chest
   like archaeologists
   we found it:
   clotted, swollen,
   aneurysmal
   sign of an old sin--

   the silent lust
   that had busied itself
   in the years
   growing
   in the hollow of his chest

   still rounded by her arms
   clinging
   belly to belly
   years beyond that first seed

   to the rigid final fact

   of a body.

Stone compares the physician's performing an autopsy to an archaeologist's penetration into a tomb. Each of them "excavates," finding a means to unlock the way to a "cavity." In those cavities, of course, there are always, potentially, secrets that are worth uncovering and knowing. Both of them journey to the past by going "in." As if magically, the ribs spring open like gates for the physician-pathologist even as the "lost ark" might spring open for an archaeologist-adventurer. Unlocked here is the visible sign that, read correctly, reveals the secret locked in the cadaver's chest. It is "clotted, swollen, aneurismal." The pathologist knows to read the evidence, residual in the flesh, indicative of the cause and course of the disease. Curiously, he does not name it, for it has already been named in the epigraph he has chosen for his poem, an excerpt from an unidentified "medical textbook": "The initial lesion of syphilis may result over the years in a gradual weakening and dilatation (aneurysm) of the aorta. This aneurysm may ultimately rupture and lead to death of the patient." The body of the poem offers up a different kind of naming. The "clotted, swollen, aneurismal sign" of "an old sin," of an "old lust." In place of the clinical term we have judgmental and moralistic words. Partner in this "sin" of commission--this linking of lust and death--is a she, whose arms still "surround" his body, their bodies still clinging "belly to belly" from the first moment of the "seed" to the "rigid final fact" of the body placed before the physician. The long absent lover, present in the "aneurismal sign" showing forth from the cadaver's open chest, is reminiscent of vampirish lovers darkly celebrated in gothic romanticism.

All mention of "sin" and "lust" disappears when Stone treats the same basic experience in "An Infected Heart" (In the Country of Hearts, NY: Delta Books, 1990):

      Lovers have always known that love can go bad and infect the
   metaphorical heart. And physicians have long known that love can
   infect the literal heart, too. My first palpable encounter with
   the literal heart, early in medical school, in gross anatomy lab,

   showed me just how resistant such infections can be.

      The body on which we worked was that of a man, perhaps fifty
   years old. He was muscular, in life a laborer, I imagined. His
   body was like a textbook, perfect, flawless. As freshman
   medical students, we had no idea why such a perfect body might have
   died--until we opened the chest.

      His heart, like his other muscles, was heavy with the weight of
   life. But the most striking abnormality within the cave of his
   chest was the enlargement of his aorta, the artery that
   distributes blood over the body. His aorta was ballooned out,
   swollen to three times its normal size. Such a weak, bulging
   aorta, an aneurysm, could have come only from syphilis,
   which he had contracted years--or, more likely, decades--before.
   This revelation completely transformed our daily encounters with
   our cadaver. This was now no longer a mere anatomy textbook,
   yielding up its slow secrets. No. This was a man, instantly
   humanized, who had walked and worked among us and died of love.
   And, in some metaphysical sense, the woman from whom he had
   contracted the disease was still there with him on the dissection
   table, after all those years. As Racine wrote in Phedre, "It
   is no longer a passion hidden in my heart, it is Venus herself
   fastened to her prey" (75).

Rather than resorting to the judgment implicit in the guilt-laden terms "sin" and "lust," the prose-writer, in discovering the secret hitherto hidden in the "cave," perceived that his relationship to the cadaver has changed. If the secrets uncovered are still those that confirm the information set forth in the "gross" anatomy textbook, this secret humanizes the cadaver. It gives him a past, a history, a biography. To the first-year medical student the "cadaver" has come "alive"; it has become a presence quickened--a life romanticized, if not sentimentalized, by the prose writer, who decides that the muscular (perhaps) laborer "died of love." Moreover, the lover from whom he contracted the disease so long ago is also present, in a way, in the body on the dissection table--an example of "Venus herself," as Stone suggests, "fastened to her prey." It is a form of physiological loyalty, but after such knowledge and loyalty (to adapt T. S. Eliot's question in "Gerontion"), what forgiveness?

Appropriately, "The Infected Heart" opens a section entitled "The Patient as Art" of In the Country of Hearts, a collection of Stone's essays published in 1990, The clinical facts--syphilis, enlargement of the aorta--are noted routinely, but the writer-physician's work does not end there. He chooses to weave a bare-bones narrative in which the physician recalls how the specific clinical knowledge obtained by the first-year medical student transformed his relationship to his cadaver from, as Martin Buber formulated it, an "I-It" to an "I-Thou" relationship, that is to say, from some thing that was merely case-closed dead, to a human being who died from the consequences of his having made love with a specific, if unidentifiable, lover. "An Infected Heart" affects objectivity but slips into a mode of romantic generosity bordering on moral permissiveness. Still it strikes me as essentially less moralistic than "Cadaver," an otherwise intentionally objective poem.

George Monteiro, Brown University