When I read a book for work, it’s usually slow going. But once I’d read a few pages of surgeon Allan Hamilton’s new book, The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters With Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope, I could hardly put it down.
Dr. Hamilton, the former chief of neurosurgery at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, tells story after story of how the strange, tragic, and sometimes amazing hand of fate enters the most sterile operating room, and how hope—and forces more mysterious than hope—can mean the difference between life and death.
One of the most gripping stories is about Thomas, a 10-year-old patient at the Pediatric Burn Service in Boston, who had burns all over his body after falling on a high-voltage power line. In the early, critical days, Thomas’s body rejected skin graft after skin graft from recently deceased strangers. Then, writes Dr. Hamilton, “fate intervened.”
Thomas’s 42-year-old father died of a heart attack, and Dr. Hamilton and his team used the father’s skin to swaddle Thomas. The night after the surgery, Thomas regained consciousness and asked what had happened to his father, whom he said he could see standing at the foot of his bed, looking down at him.
“The spirit of Thomas’s father had come from beyond the realm of flesh to intervene, to protect, and maybe even guide us as we took care of his son,” writes Dr. Hamilton, who saw Thomas again years later, still deformed by his injuries but able to flash a radiant smile. As Dr. Hamilton sees it, “Supernatural comfort is all around us…and never leaves us alone without divine strength and protection.”
At first I found it strange that Dr. Hamilton took Thomas at his word, believing that the father’s spirit was real. But Dr. Hamilton writes convincingly of his evolution from an achievement-minded resident (who, for example, called the children on the burn ward “crispy critters”) to a doctor humbled by the lives and deaths of his patients. That journey opened him up to the less scientific realms of human existence. Part of that transformation involved his own experience suffering from a severe back injury that eventually forced him to quit surgery. “Suffering is not the point of living,” he writes. “It’s the background against which we discover love’s power over death, over illness.”
Those are pretty inspiring words, and as I read the book late at night, I couldn’t help but stop for a moment to watch my sleeping children and feel grateful for their intact skin, their pain-free sleep, their simple existence.
Dr. Hamilton is aware that other surgeons, scientists, and skeptics will dismiss his collection of stories as mere anecdotes. But as integrative health pioneer Andrew Weil writes in the book’s foreword, “Good science begins with uncontrolled observation. If observations do not fit the standard mode of reality—especially if they do not fit—scientists should give them attention.” In other words, science begins with anecdotes.
Given this endorsement, I was disappointed to learn that some stories in Dr. Hamilton’s book are amalgams of several patient stories—including a fascinating tale about a clinically dead woman whose “spirit” seemed to remain alive while on the operating table. Dr. Hamilton’s own story about a Navajo shaman helping to free him from the spirit of a boy who died under his care also strained my own limits of credulity at the sheer drama of Dr. Hamilton’s life.
Whatever the facts of certain cases he relates (and some details are obviously changed for privacy reasons), and whatever a reader’s ability to suspend disbelief, Dr. Hamilton’s “Twenty Rules to Live By”—included at the end of the book—has applications for everyone. Ranging from “Find a doctor who cares about you” to “Develop your own healing rituals,” they are not just for patients but for anyone who faces death—a group that, as Dr. Hamilton points out, includes all of us.
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Comments (3)
This reminds me of Oliver Sacks — The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and others. Not necessarily spiritual, but very very interesting from a physiological point of view and I highly recommend.
As a pastor I have ministered to many people in a health crisis as they are experiencing the nightmare they prayed would never come. Faith and God are always present in these difficult times. Sometimes He is seen easier than others. I’m humbled that God works to touch people through me in their darkest moments.
- Greg from http://FaithFirstFitness.com
I am a nurse. I’m reminded of a story about my patient, in his 40’s, who waited for a heart transplant. He had been managing well, and when the time came he had misgivings, and a lot of fear. He had received a call – they had a heart for him. He was a nervous wreck. He was ready to “beg” for some Valium while in the waiting room. His surgeon came to speak with him on arrival. He told me he saw an angel standing behind the surgeon and experienced an immediate sense of calm and well-being. It was also the surgeon’s last operation before retiring, also of interest.
He continues to do well.