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BRENT DEAN ROBBINS
THE MEDICALIZED BODY

AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE
THE CADAVER, THE MEMORIAL BODY,
AND THE RECOVERY OF LIVED EXPERIENCE
The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture
Brent Dean Robbins
The Medicalized
Body and Anesthetic
Culture
The Cadaver, the Memorial Body, and the Recovery
of Lived Experience
Brent Dean Robbins
Department of Psychology
Point Park University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
ISBN 978-1-349-95355-4 ISBN 978-1-349-95356-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95356-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934665
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover image: © Nunzio Paci
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company

Nature America, Inc. part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
For my Father, John R. Robbins
Acknowledgements
This book has been a long journey of over two decades of scholarship,
completed over a career as a graduate student in clinical psychology at
Duquesne University, and two tenure-track professorships at Daemen
College and Point Park University.
I am grateful to my mentors, Michael Sipiora and Eva-Maria Simms,
who introduced me to metabletic phenomenology through the work of
Robert Romanyshyn and J. H. van den Berg. At Daemen College, my
research on medical students would not have been possible without the
help of Ashley Tomaka, Gary Styn, Joel Patterson, and Cara Innus. At
Point Park University, my scholarship has been deeply enriched through
hours of conversation with my friend and colleague, Robert McInerney.
Seminal scholarship by others has been formative for my investiga-
tions, including Carolyn Merchant’s work on Enlightenment views of
women and nature, Martha Nussbaum’s taxonomy of forms of objec-
tification, Michael Allen Gillespie’s examination of the impact of nomi-
nalism on modern and postmodern thought, Nick Haslam’s theoretical
model of dehumanization, Katherine Park’s historical scholarship on the
history of cadaver dissection, Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman’s schol-
arship on liberation psychology, Ernest Becker’s existential theory,
and the many psychologists who have contributed to the empirical
investigation of terror management theory, including among them Jeff
Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, Jamie Goldenberg, and
my former student from Allegheny College, Matt Motyl. Continental
philosophers have also been deeply formative for my thinking,
vii
viii Acknowledgements
especially Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

Emmanuel Levinas, Max Scheler, Paul Ricoeur, Erich Fromm, and Rene
Girard.
For shaping my critical faculties regarding critical psychiatry, I am
indebted to Daniel Burston, R. D. Laing, Robert Whitaker, Sharna
Olfman, Peter Kinderman, Lisa Cosgrove, Allen Frances, Sarah Kamens,
and many others.
I am also grateful to the many colleagues who have supported and
challenged me through my involvement in Society from Humanistic
Psychology, including Richard Bargdill, Harris Friedman, Frank Farley,
Jonathan Raskin, Gina Belton, Louis Hoffman, Shawn Rubin, Todd
Dubose, Justin Karter, Kevin Keenan, Chloe Detrick, David Cain,
Donna Rockwell, Scott Churchill, Fred Wertz, Rodger Broome, Candice
Hershman, Kevin Keenan, Connie Kellogg, Brent Potter, Amanda Lowe,
Kirk Schneider, Tom Greening, Robert Stolorow, Daniel Helminiak,
Krishna Kumar, Sarah Kass, Nathaniel Granger, Jr., Lisa Vallejos, Ilene
Serlin, Trisha Nash, Drake Spaeth, Theopia Jackson, Brian Hanna, Paul
Wong, David St. John, Heidi Levitt, and many others, who have been
like a second family over the years.
For spiritual formation, I must thank my pastor, Fr. Richard Infante,
Mike Aquilina, Don Fontana, Sam Arnone, David Mills, Andrew Purcell,
Jack Nelson, and Michael Liccione, to name a few guiding lights.
Most importantly, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my family,
who have sacrificed many hours of time with me so that I could com-
plete this work and who are the centre of my life. My wife, April, is the
one person without whom I cannot imagine where I would be. She’s my
compass, my heart. My son Dean is also a joy who always makes him-
self available for conversations about my work, and not only does he pay
attention and express interest, his own research has contributed substan-
tially to my thinking—a feat that is more than impressive considering he
is merely 14 years of age. My youngest, Dominic, deserves praise for his
patience, over the many times I had to delay a game or outing to finish
one last edit which turned into yet another and another. My mother has
been the most supportive and encouraging parent one could ask for and
always ready to lend an ear, emotional support, and even financial sup-
port whenever we needed it. This book is dedicated to my father, who
I cared for in his final days, often typing as I sat by his bedside. After
he lost his speaking voice to a mysterious neurological disease, I told
him this book would be dedicated to him. The memory of his smile will
Acknowledgements ix
warm my heart always. Thanks to Kelli (and many family members) for
taking good care of him (and me) in the twilight of his days.
Above all, I thank God, who like a patient father, puts up with my
protests in the face of human suffering and mortality, and gives me the
courage and faith, in the midst of it all, to hope and to love.
Contents
1 The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture 1
2 Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial of Death in

Modern Medicine 19
3 Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

Rationality: A Metabletic Entry Point 45
4 The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision 65
5 Applications of Terror Management Theory 85
6 Terror Management in Medical Culture 105
7 Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science 127
8 Objectification of the Body as a Terror Management

Defense 151
9 The Objectification of Women and Nature 167
xi
xii Contents
10 The Role of the Medical Cadaver in the Genesis

of Enlightenment-Era Science and Technology 181
11 A Theological Context 205
12 The Changing Nature of the Cadaver 223
13 Anesthetic Culture 247
14 Psychiatry’s Collusion with Anesthetic Culture 275
15 Mindfulness—The Way of the Heart 301
Index 321
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Plate XXXI from the manuscript of Guy de Vigevano

of 1345 at Chantilly 30
Fig. 2.2 Vesalius, page xxi of De human corporis fabrica
(1543 edition) 31
Fig. 2.3 Anatomical drawing from page 174 of De human
corporis fabrica by Vesalius 33
Fig. 4.1 Drawing of horizon line and vanishing point
by Leon Battista Alberti 70
Fig. 12.1 Plate to Johann Dryander, Anatomia Mundini,
ad vetustissimorum, eorundemque aliquot manu
scriptorum, codicum fidem collata, iustoque suo
ordini restituta, Marpurg 1521, fol. 65r 238
Fig. 12.2 Title page to the second edition of Andreas Vesalius’
De Corporis humani fabrica, 1543 239
xiii
CHAPTER 1
The Medicalized Body

and Anesthetic Culture
Pixar has long been known for their state-of-the-art animated films, from
Toy Story to Finding Nemo. More recently, a beautiful, heart-warming
film, Coco, has introduced an international audience to an annual
Mexican ritual to honor the dead, Dias de Muertos, or the Day of the
Dead. In the movie, a prepubescent boy, named Miguel Rivera, discov-
ers his great-great grandfather played a guitar that resembled that of
the famous pop singer, Ernesto de la Cruz. In his quest to discover the
man’s true identity, he is thrust into the netherworld of the dead, where
he undergoes a great adventure to retrieve his long-lost and forgotten
ancestor.
The fictional narrative of the film introduces the audience to the
practices and rituals that are familiar to the Mexican people. Altars to
deceased relatives honor the dead with photographs, decorations that
include Mexican marigolds, intimate possessions and ofrendas, offer-
ings of favorite food and beverages of the deceased (Brandes, 2009).
The Mexican people celebrate the holiday between October 31 and
November 2, the period of time established by the Roman Catholic tra-
dition for the celebration of All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween, All Saints’
Day, and All Souls’ Day, designated for remembrance of saints and loved
ones who have passed away.
In watching the film, I was reminded of similar rituals the world over,
most commonly found in indigenous cultures, and especially common in
South America, which honor the dead in a variety of ritual celebrations
similar to the Mexican tradition. For example, I recalled the Haitian
© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. D. Robbins, The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95356-1_1
2 B. D. Robbins
Vodou practice of offering animal sacrifices, a chicken for example, to the

Gods, or lwa, which include among them the dead who have passed on
into the spirit realm (Ramsey, 2011).
On May 5 of each year, the people of Bolivia celebrate Día de las
Ñatitas (Day of the Skulls), in which family members exhume the bones
of relatives three years after their interment. This ritual, dating back to
indigenous tradition, allows the family to preserve the skulls of family in
their homes, where they are believed to offer protection to the house-
hold throughout the year. In November, the skulls are gifted with offer-
ings, such as a crown of flowers, cigarettes, and alcohol (Arguinzoni,
2016).
In contrast, contemporary North American and European practices
related to the dead have shifted quite dramatically over the past several
centuries. Whereas the church cemetery had once been located in the
center of town, burials in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have
tended to occur in cemeteries located outside the commercial areas of
cities, in more rural and decentered locations, or the practice of crema-
tion has replaced the burial (Aries, 1975).
Prior to the nineteenth century, the family was primarily responsible
for care of the dying and dead. The process of dying and preparation
of the dead was a highly visible and ritualized process, even to children,
which by the twentieth century, with the proliferation of hospitals and
funeral homes, was largely taken over by professionals. As a result, prepa-
ration of the dead has become increasingly invisible and the relationship
to the deceased has become more distant, both spatially and emotionally
(DeSpelder & Strickland, 1992; Gordon & Marshall, 2000; Johnson,
2018; O’Connor, 1986). As late as early twentieth century, the liv-
ing room of the family home was known as the “Death Room,” due to
its role in housing the deceased during the funeral wake. Today, most
deaths occur in hospitals, and funerals are held in funeral homes where
embalming and preparation of the body occur out of sight and mind of
the mourning family. As a consequence, death has become more sani-
tized, and non-professional mourners are preserved from the encoun-
ter with the process of decay and dissolution of the body of the dead.
Obviously, there are practical benefits to these arrangements, not least
of which is sanitation and protection from potential contagion. But the
downsides are apparent, too, since the invisibility of death fosters, in our
daily lives, a different, more aloof relationship to death, and enables a
social pattern of death denial (Aries, 1975).
1 THE MEDICALIZED BODY AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE 3
The history of San Francisco offers a poignant illustration of the place

of the dead in contemporary North American society. During the gold
rush, the population of San Francisco 49ers ballooned so quickly, and
contagious disease spread rapidly and claimed many lives. Cemeteries
in the region quickly filled and were kept far from the living (Brooks,
2017; Trufelman, 2017). By the late 1800s, the demand for land and
the desire of the living to distance themselves from the dead led to an
outcry to remove the human remains from cemeteries within the city
limits of San Francisco. By the turn of the twentieth century, burial of
new dead within the city was outlawed by the Board of Supervisors of
the County of San Francisco (Trufelman, 2017). In 1814, the city passed
an ordinance to begin a process to remove the dead from the city, to
be relocated to the town of Colma, roughly 10 miles South of the city.
Hundreds of thousands of bodies were disinterred and moved to new
burial sites in Colma. For the dead without living relatives, bodies were
relocated into mass graves and their tombstones were repurposed for use
in the oceans to prevent beach erosion or as masonry along the pathways
of Buena Vista Park.
In the transfer of the dead from San Francisco to Colma, a process
that took decades, partly as a result of legal battles, many bodies were
left behind and even to this day remain buried beneath the city’s infra-
structure (Brooks, 2017). During construction of University of San
Francisco’s Gleeson Library in the 1950s, for example, roughly 200 bod-
ies were discovered in the area that had been the Masonic Cemetery. In
1966, during the construction of the Hayes-Healy residence hall, more
human remains were discovered, and in 2011, as builders excavated
land for the Center for Science and Innovation, dozens of coffins, skel-
etons, and skulls were unearthed (Brooks, 2017). In the area that was
the Golden Gate Cemetery, workers developing land for the Legion of
Honor found somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 bodies. The state
of the bodies suggests previous excavators operated without respect for
the dead. They “just plowed through burial sites, and plumbers laid
pipes right through bodies and skeletons,” and headstones were callously
thrown into the ocean (Kingston, 1997, n.p.).
The disregard for the dead of San Francisco and its contrast with
indigenous cultures, such as in Mexico and Bolivia, where the remains of
the dead are celebrated and kept close to family, couldn’t be more stark.
This clash of cultures between White North American and European
attitudes toward the dead and indigenous people has more recently
4 B. D. Robbins
played out in protests of Native Americans in response to the Dakota

Access Pipeline project. When the pipeline threatened sacred burial
grounds at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, Native American peo-
ples united to resist the threat to the sacred land of the Sioux (Enzinna,
2017; McKenna, 2017; Ravitz, 2016). The Sioux people of Standing
Rock Reservation offer Protection Prayers to the dead in order to aid the
deceased in their passage from the land of the living to the spirit world.
If the burial ground is disturbed, they fear, the dead may remain caught
among the living and wander the land (Ravitz, 2016). Moreover, the
pipeline, according to the Sioux people, would bring a potential danger
to their supply of water from Lake Oahe, since the transport of crude oil
through the line would travel within close proximity to the Lake on its
way under the Missouri River (Enzinna, 2017).
When the protesters, who deemed themselves “water protectors,”
were attacked with dogs by private security guards, the Standing Rock
protest gained international attention (Enzinna, 2017). However, while
President Barack Obama halted construction of the pipeline in order to
commission more environmental research on its impact, 470,000 barrels
of crude oil now (as of 2018) flows through the pipeline due to a rever-
sal of Obama’s order upon the election of Donald Trump (McKenna,
2017).
For the Sioux people of Standing Rock, and the hundreds of Native
American tribes who joined them for the protest of the Dakota Access
Pipeline, the approval of the pipeline by President Trump is much more
than a setback. Many experience the event as a re-traumatization, the
opening of a deep and festering wound suffered by Native Americans
due to past wrongdoings by colonialist white people against indige-
nous people of America (Itkowitz, 2017). The continuation of the
pipeline project, for example, is a bitter reminder of the building of the
Oahe Dam by the Army Corp of Engineers which led to the flooding
of 56,000 acres of farm land on the Standing Rock reservation in the
1960s (McKenna, 2017). The Sioux people experience the pipeline as a
violation of the 1851 treaty which provided the Sioux with a much wider
range of land that, just a few decades later, led to an even greater restric-
tion of land after gold was found in the Black Hills (McKenna, 2017).
The ongoing violations of trust have contributed to historical trauma,
which has been linked to high rates of mental illness, alcoholism, pov-
erty, and suicide among Native American people (Brown-Rice, 2013).
The callous treatment of Native American people and disregard for

the health of ecosystems in the name of material gain, driven by greed,
are symptoms of a cultural sickness that I shall refer to as “anesthetic
consciousness.” As a state of mind, anesthetic consciousness refers to a
form of psychic numbing and is characterized by symptoms of alexithy-
mia and experiential avoidance. Alexithymia refers to an incapacity to
gain insight into one’s emotional life and the emotions of others, and
is associated with diminished empathy (Taylor, Bagby, & Parker, 1997).
Alexithymia is, itself, associated with experiential avoidance, an aversion
to the experience of unpleasant or aversive experience that is character-
ized by defensiveness and various forms of psychopathology (Kashdan,
Barrios, Forsyth, & Steger, 2006).
In this book, I will examine anesthetic consciousness as a cultural
habit ingrained in White European and North American colonialist cul-
ture, and that can be traced to habits of comportment that emerged in
the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance as a response to a conflu-
ence of social and historical events. As a cultural habit, anesthetic con-
sciousness is characterized by tendencies to objectify self, others, and the
natural world. Through an attitude of dispassionate concern, anesthetic
consciousness is associated with empathic disengagement and tenden-
cies toward exploitative attitudes toward other people and nature, vio-
lence, and expressions that range between the extremes of hedonism
and asceticism. As a state of mind, anesthetic consciousness tends to
express itself in quasi-dissociative attitudes in which mind and body are
experienced as split off from one another, which amounts to a kind of
self-objectification. As a perceptual habit and epistemological attitude,
it orients itself to the world through ongoing attempts to gain mastery
and control, and it seeks to manage risk through the acquisition of power
and domination. Beneath ongoing and paradoxically counterproductive
attempts at control, lurks the unexamined fear of death and sophisticated
and elusive strategies to deny mortality. Cutoff from the embodied, expe-
riential wisdom of the living organism through psychic numbing, the
victim of anesthetic consciousness fails to appropriately orient him- or
herself toward enriching and nourishing intrinsic needs, instead remain-
ing insatiably geared to extrinsic goals, such as the acquisition of material
goods, power, and status, which ultimately fail to satisfy and therefore
only amplify desire toward destructive ends.
Anesthetic consciousness has become a culturally normative and
socially rewarded attitude through influential social institutions which
6 B. D. Robbins
have cultivated detached concern as an epistemological ideal. To under-

stand its cultural roots, I will draw upon phenomenological, qualitative
research of medical students working with cadavers in gross anatomy.
The findings reveal how medical culture institutes a kind of anesthetic
consciousness that begins with the suppression of the memorial body
of the cadaver, thereby reducing the body specimen to a mechanism as
a basis for acquisition of power to heal and ultimately with the aim to
defeat death. The memorial body, in this case, refers to the body of the
cadaver which recalls the personhood of the deceased and the living body
of the donor. The body of the cadaver invites the student to imagina-
tively engage with the dead in their private lives. The qualitative data
reveal how the suppression of the memorial body of the cadaver initiates
students into an attitude of detached concern toward living patients and
through which the living body of patient and self become appropriated
through a form of mechanistic objectification.
Once the phenomenology of the medicalized body is sketched out
through the descriptions of medical students, I turn to the method of
metabletic phenomenology to examine the cultural genesis of medical
culture as worldview that emerged as a means to cope with the ubiq-
uity of death and dying in medical practice. Through a close reading of
historical evidence, interpreted through the lens of the psychology of
death denial, I aim to provide a range of evidence to support the hypoth-
esis that modern anatomy and its impact on medical practice has served
as an agent of cultural transformation. Medical dispassion, through the
suppression of the memorial body and the denial of the lived body of
everyday life, provided a template upon which the major innovations in
the arts and sciences would come to transform everyday life in ways that
would normalize and institutionalize anesthetic consciousness as a perva-
sive cultural pattern. I will trace the influence of anesthetic consciousness
on the birth of linear perspective art, the objectivist epistemology of the
new physics that gave birth to the Scientific Revolution, and the colonial
conquest of foreign peoples and their land which would radically trans-
form the world within just a few centuries of time.
Metabletic phenomenology interprets historical events through a
psychological lens. In this case, the history of the medicalized body is
informed not only by qualitative, phenomenological research on the
experience of the body; our cultural–historical analysis also draws
upon state-of-the-art empirical research in personality and social psy-
chology. The study of medical culture and its cultivation of anesthetic
consciousness are particularly informed by an enormous body of evi-

dence that has been generated in support of terror management theory.
Influenced by the work of Ernest Becker, terror management theory
studies how human experience and behavior is shaped by the various
ways we cope with the fact that we are creatures who die and not only
that, we live with an awareness of death as a fate that we bear with us and
that will befall not only ourselves but those we love.
With terror management theory as a guide, given its sound basis in
empirical psychological evidence, the examination of anesthetic con-
sciousness is provided with a secure foundation. Understood through
existential theory, and by examining its role in medicine and modern cul-
ture writ large, anesthetic consciousness can be thoroughly disclosed as
a sophisticated and powerful method of coping with human mortality—
an approach to coping with death that yields great utility but at a heavy
price of severing us from the experiential wisdom discovered through
lived embodiment.
When coupled with existential theory, metabletic phenomenology
is fully equipped to operate more optimally in the service of a cultural
therapy. In existential and depth-oriented psychotherapy, the individual
patient examines his or her past through a deep and passionate engage-
ment in a fully present mode of awareness, to the extent possible. As
the past is rediscovered and relived in the present, the client discovers a
renewed understanding of the past in the service of opening new orienta-
tions to the future. An existential approach to cultural history, informed
by metabletic phenomenology, operates in a similar way. Through an
examination of the past in light of its existential import, insights into our
historical origins enliven our collective imagination and point toward
new possibilities for ourselves and our relations to one another within
the communal body within which we participate.
Our existential analysis of anesthetic consciousness, as a cultural ther-
apy, will strive to reorient the collective consciousness of Western cul-
ture toward a renewal of our lived, embodied experience. To accomplish
this task, as in individual existential therapy, the rekindling of sensuous
awareness must begin with the courage to face our mortality and to
rediscover our relation to the past through a renewed appreciation for
what the dead can still teach us.
As I have suggested already, indigenous cultures provide us with
examples of how cultures can institute practices to encourage its people
to reconnect with the past through honoring the dead. Over the past
8 B. D. Robbins
centuries, as anesthetic consciousness has become a habit, modern cul-

ture has tended to keep the dead, and death, at a comfortable distance.
Like the town of San Francisco, we have tended to export death to the
outer limits of our cities, and to the extent that cities mirror the inner
landscape of our collective imagination, we have likewise managed to
keep our mortality at a psychological distance. However, cultural heal-
ing from historical traumas of the West will necessitate a return to lived
experience in order to authentically confront our mortality. Through a
return to lived experience, and a recovery of the memorial body, there
is hope for cultivation of new habits of mindful awareness, includ-
ing the rediscovery of the relational, embodied beings we are, with an
innate capacity for empathic engagement to care for one another. In the
end, our cultural therapeutics aims at the recovery of lived experience
for the greater good of rediscovering the dignity of the person, the care
of whom is the implicit meaning and purpose of medical theory and
practice.
This book is structured in order to move back and forth between
qualitative and quantitative research in psychology, and cultural and his-
torical analysis, so that insight into the psychology of individuals may
shed light on the psychological import of our collective existence as a
culture and society. The ongoing return to the psychological import of
medical culture, and its influence on psychology and society, provides the
backbone of the work. With that said, I can now describe how this com-
plex and multilayered analysis will unfold over the course of the book.
Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial

of Death in Modern Medicine
Through a cultural hermeneutic interpretation of the cadaver in the

history of modern medicine, Chapter 2 will argue that at least some
medical interpretations of embodiment serve as a form of death denial.
This analysis will draw on four major sources of evidence to support
this contention: (a) the history of cadaver dissection in Western medi-
cine, (b) diary entries by medical students taking a course in gross anat-
omy, (c) responses to a panel on cadaver dissection held at Daemen
College, and (d) interviews with Gunther von Hagens, the creator of
the “BodyWorlds” exhibit, which features plastinated corpses for the
purpose of “edutainment.” In each of these cases, the data suggest that
medical education works implicitly to manage death anxiety through a

set of defenses which conceal the nothingness of death. Namely by mak-
ing death into a concrete event, preserved for example in the form of the
cadaver or plastinated corpses, and by speaking rhetorically about death
as a mechanical process, the medical model of death conceals the existen-
tial terror that comes with the lived experience of death as the termina-
tion of existence.
Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

Rationality: A Metabletic Entry Point
While a phenomenological study of medical students in gross anat-
omy provides some profound insights into the ambiguous status of the
cadaver and the suppression of the memorial body in medical education,
a deeper and more penetrating analysis requires an understanding of
medical culture within its larger historical context. Metabletic phenom-
enology, a psychological and historical approach to understanding the
changing nature of lived experience, can be utilized to illuminate how
the medical body emerges from within a peculiar, Western worldview. By
turning to a phenomenology of time, Chapter 3 situates medical culture
within a radical shift in the conception and experience of time in Western
culture. As the experience of time underwent a profound change, the
Western world, and medicine, became increasingly ordered for the pur-
pose of risk management as a coping mechanism for dealing with uncer-
tainty and human mortality. However, the emphasis on calculative
rationality for the purpose of risk containment paradoxically threatens to
undermine the conditions that make life meaningful and give it direction.
The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision

The metabletic analysis of Western culture’s new conception and expe-
rience of time is further explored in Chapter 4. Time is examined for its
implications for an equally radical transformation in the conception and
experience of space and place. The emergence of the linear perspective
technique in Renaissance art, as developed by Brunelleschi and Alberti,
is systematically examined as a cultural artifact that uniquely discloses a
qualitative shift in the perception of spatiality, which in turn, implies a
transformation of lived embodiment. The lived embodiment of a culture
10 B. D. Robbins
informed by linear perspective vision is found to reflect the medical body

of the cadaver, whose memorial body has been neglected and suppressed
through a process of clinical detachment, expressed through an objectiv-
ist epistemology. The cultural myth of the zombie, within this context,
comes to be understood as a shadow of the neglected memorial body
and suppressed lived body that, within the cultural imagination, comes
to be replaced by the objectified body seen through the figure of the
medical cadaver.
Applications of Terror Management Theory

The suppression of the memorial body in gross anatomy is revelatory
of modern medicine’s overall coping mechanism for coping with the
ubiquity of death, dying and human suffering encountered in medical
practice. The cost of this style of coping includes a diminished capac-
ity for empathy in medical practitioners. A fuller comprehension of the
compensatory, defense mechanisms of modern medicine, as a means
of coping with mortality, requires a more systematic overview of terror
management theory, which is the focus of Chapter 5. In general, people
cope with death through two basic avenues, the enhancement of self-es-
teem and the protection of one’s cultural worldview. Neuroscientific evi-
dence has shown a brain area called the insula plays an important role in
the self-regulation of emotions associated with terror management, with
regard to both self-esteem and empathic engagement with others. These
principles of terror management theory provide a framework to unlock
modern medicine’s unique and rather ingenuous strategies for the man-
agement of death anxiety through cognitive and neurological manage-
ment of self-worth and worldview defense of medical culture.
Terror Management in Medical Culture

Chapter 6 explores the implications of terror management theory for a
deeper and more penetrating insight into the terror management func-
tions of medical culture. The contemporary physician finds him or herself
in a precarious position as a cultural hero who not only serves medic-
inal functions, but also is often expected to answer questions of deep
moral and spiritual import. Physicians, in this latter sense, function like
secular priests. A common motivation for entering medical school is a
desire for respect, an extrinsic motivation that, when dominant, tends to
be associated with surface learning driven by fear of failure, neuroticism,

and greater risk of exhaustion. In contrast, the motivation to enter med-
icine in order to help people seems to serve a protective function. These
research findings can be clarified in light of Ernest Becker’s theory that
self-esteem functions to protect the self against anxiety and mortal con-
cerns. In the case of medicine, the role of doctor can be understood as a
cultural hero-project. When the self-esteem of the physician is weakened,
the physician is exposed to increased risk of burnout. To protect self-
esteem, physicians can become prone to cognitive biases to protect self-
worth, which can lead to “medical narcissism” and “defensive medicine”
based on self-serving attributions that raise the risk of medical error.
Worldview defense in medicine is linked to racism, sexism, and stigma-
tization of certain out-groups by medical professionals. Finally, medical
scientism can operate as a form of existential dogmatism that, while serv-
ing as a worldview defense for medical professionals, can nevertheless
undermine the ends of science as an open-ended inquiry and put physi-
cians in conflict with patients and their families who differ in worldview.
Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science

In Chapter 7, the analysis explores how modern medicine and science
share propensities to objectify and dehumanize the person. The concept
of the person has been a neglected area of scholarship in medicine. This
neglect is related to the emphasis on third-person perspective method-
ologies that dominate the social sciences and medicine. A more ade-
quate comprehension of personhood requires holistic and non-reductive
approaches to science that integrate first-person and second-person per-
spectives of the person along with third-person perspectives. Resistance
to a paradigm shift in science, which would integrate qualitative and
quantitative methodologies, can be understood as defensive attempts to
maintain the existential dogmatism wedded to scientism and technization
as the dominant discourse of medicine, psychiatry, and psychology. This
defensiveness can, itself, be understood as a worldview defense that pro-
vides protection against anxiety linked to mortality concerns. However,
the dehumanization of the patient and indirectly the dehumanization of
the doctor and other medical professionals are unintended but devastat-
ing consequences of this existential dogmatism that reduces the person
to the status of a cadaver. Neuroscientific evidence demonstrates that this
reductive approach to the body is linked to the suppression of empathy
12 B. D. Robbins
and, consequently, is counterproductive to medical practice in which

healing relationships are essential for positive medical outcomes.
Objectification of the Body

as a Terror Management Defense
Cartesian subject–object metaphysics operative in medical discourse ren-

ders it impossible to grapple with the ambiguity of the cadaver. Within
this framework, the cadaver seems to present itself as an object, but an
object haunted by the subjectivity of the deceased. Chapter 8 seeks a
proper orientation to the ambiguity of the cadaver through an appreci-
ation of the distinction between the cadaver and the lived body. When
understood in light of the lived body, the cadaver can be more appro-
priately contextualized as an ambiguity that pivots on the dual axis of an
anatomical artifact versus a memorial body. When the cadaver becomes
too closely identified with the living patient, medicine tends to conflate
the object-cadaver with the embodied subject of the living patient. Just
as suppression of the memorial body serves a terror management func-
tion, however, the objectification of the living patient is also a coping
mechanism in the face of mortal risk; yet as a consequence, the patient is
dehumanized. The dehumanization of the patient in medical discourse
can be understood as the expression of a cultural neurosis by which
awareness of death is evaded by avoidance of bodily awareness.
The Objectification of Women and Nature

Chapter 9 explores how dehumanization as a terror management defense
is especially prone to impact attitudes and behaviors toward women. A
compelling body of evidence demonstrates that reminders of feminine
reproductive functions, including menstruation, lactation, and preg-
nancy, are typically associated with nature. Reminders of the creaturely
aspects of women and thoughts about nature tend to trigger anxieties
about death and dying. As a result, the animalistic or mechanistic objec-
tification of women serves a terror management function. Animalistic
objectification reduces the woman to an object that is less than human,
whereas mechanistic objectification idealizes the feminine body as a
means to suppress creaturely aspects of feminine reproduction that are
experienced as threatening. Objectification can take on various forms,
which are explored systematically.
The Role of the Medical Cadaver in the Genesis

of Enlightenment-Era Science and Technology
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a profound cultural shift

took place. In Chapter 10, a review of Carolyn Merchant’s classic text,
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, illu-
minates how the exploitation of the natural world hinged upon the iden-
tification of women’s bodies with the natural world. The cosmos of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance was understood to be an integrated, holis-
tic, and hierarchical order in harmonious relation, wherein the organism
of the body reflected the intrinsic natural order of the larger cosmos.
With the revival of Neoplatonism in the Renaissance, the intellectual cli-
mate placed increasing emphasis on the separation of matter and form,
the duality of appearance and form, and mathematical models geared
toward the manipulation of matter. The devaluing of the natural world
corresponded to the devaluing and persecution of women, including the
witch trials and exclusion of women from their previous role in medicine,
particularly in the role of midwife. A pervasive theme of objectification
provided the basis for the rationalization of cruelty and violence in var-
ied forms, including experimentation upon animals, the subjugation and
domination of women, the enslavement of black people, the exploita-
tion of workers, and the desecration of the natural world. The defensive
objectification of the body, women, and nature emerged as a cultural
strategy for coping with a religious crisis.
A Theological Context
Ernest Becker’s existential theory posits that an ideal society will provide
for its members an adequate symbolic action system to propel a cultural
hero-project. In his assessment, modern society’s crisis of meaning leaves
us vulnerable to death anxiety and neurosis. Consistent with Becker’s
evaluation of modern society’s shortcomings, Chapter 11 provides
an assessment of how modern culture in the West erupts from out of
a religious crisis. This crisis provided the background against which the
mechanistic and objectifying view of the body and nature appear as dom-
inant themes. In the Middle Ages, Trinitarian theology and Christology
informed a relational conception of the cosmos, in which the body was
experienced as sacred, infused with supernatural grace through the incar-
nation, and intrinsically harmonious with nature. The nominalist revolt
14 B. D. Robbins
against Scholasticism, as described by Michael Allen Gillespie, led to a

radical change in Western culture’s understanding of God, nature, per-
sonhood, and the body. This theological transformation was preceded by
major world events, including the Great Schism, the Hundred Years War,
the Black Death, and the Crusades, which challenged the Medieval view
of the cosmos and set the stage for the new mechanical philosophy of the
Enlightenment. Fundamental to this shift in worldview was a transfor-
mation of the Medieval view of the body as sacred into the profane body
described by modern anatomy.
The Changing Nature of the Cadaver

The first documented autopsies occurred in the late Middle Ages during
the thirteenth century. Based on research by Katherine Park, Chapter 12
outlines how dissection of the body in the Middle Ages remained an
operation performed upon the sacred bodies of revered saintly women
and family members. However, as dissection was adopted in the ser-
vice of medical education, and for the purpose of identifying normative
anatomical structures in the fourteenth century, anatomical dissection
focused on the dissection of foreign criminals. By restricting dissection
to unknown and stigmatized individuals, dissection in medical schools
lent themselves to a defensive style of psychological distancing from the
memorial body of the cadaver. Vesalius exploited the new linear per-
spective technique in art for his illustrations as a means to enhance an
attitude of detached concern in relation to his anatomical specimens.
Historical evidence linking Vesalius to Galileo through mutual influences
at University of Padua strongly suggests Vesalius’ attitude of detached
concern informed and shaped the epistemological orientation of the new
physics of Galileo. This epistemological attitude was also informed by
the nascent Neoplatonism emerging in the elite circles of learned men
in Northern Italy, especially through the influence of Toscanelli. As
Vesalius’ desacralized attitude toward the cadaver gained ascendency, the
Church began to emphasize the incorruptibility of saintly bodies.
Anesthetic Culture
By use of the historical phenomenological method of metabletics,
Chapter 13 traces the cultural habit of anesthetic consciousness to the
attitude of detached concern instituted through subculture of modern
anatomical medicine and medical practice. This cultural habit and its ten-
dencies toward mechanistic objectification nature, the body, and others
are seen through as a template for the objectivist metaphysics and episte-
mology of detached objectivity. This detached objectivity, in turn, forms
the basis of mastery through prediction and control in modern culture.
The metabletic analysis highlights two periods of history that illustrate
how a confluence of influences in medicine, art, theology, and the new
science gave birth to a cultural habit of anesthetic consciousness. An
examination of the figure of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli reveals his cen-
tral role as a cultural agent, whose influence contributed to the nomi-
nalist revolution, the revival of Neoplatonism in the Renaissance, the
development of linear perspective technique in art, the new anatomy of
Vesalius, the new physics of Galileo, and the launch of colonialism at the
Council of Florence, which contributed to Christopher Columbus’ dis-
covery of the New World. A focus on America in the 1830s reveals how
the anesthetic culture of the Enlightenment casted a shadow that cul-
minated in the invention of medical anesthesia, the genocide of Native
Americans, the emergence of the Temperance Movement, and the birth
of consumerism beginning with the first department story, A. J. Stewart
and Company. These historical developments are analyzed to reveal their
implicit connection as expressions of a new Gnosticism which functions
anesthetically to escape experience through psychic numbing.
Psychiatry’s Collusion with Anesthetic Culture

As a cultural habit, anesthetic consciousness can foster extreme, dys-
functional behavior in vulnerable individuals. The lone mass shooter is
among one of many examples of pathological behavior that can be linked
to anesthetic culture. In Chapter 14, an in-depth case study of Las Vegas
shooter Stephen Paddock will illustrate how anesthetic consciousness
likely played a key role in Paddock’s violent behavior. Anesthetic con-
sciousness can be linked to Paddock’s case, including his sociopathic
father, pathological gambling, aloof social behavior, materialistic val-
ues, conformity to toxic masculine norms, and violent behavior—all of
which have been associated with hypoactivity in the insula of the brain
and are associated with severely impoverished empathy and sympathy
for others. When Paddock’s physician prescribed him a benzodiazepine
drug to treat his anxiety, this likely pushed him over the edge into vio-
lent behavior. Paddock’s case is a microcosm of a larger, problematic
16 B. D. Robbins
cultural pattern in which psychiatry tends to collude with anesthetic

consciousness.
Mindfulness—The Way of the Heart

Anesthetic consciousness is an obstacle to the organismic valuing pro-
cess by which people orient themselves to intrinsically motivated, felt val-
ues, which is the basis for experiential wisdom. As a coping mechanism
in response to the human finitude and mortality, it is a self-defeating,
maladaptive strategy. In contrast, Chapter 15 illustrates how the cultiva-
tion of mindfulness creates present-centered, embodied awareness of felt
values which enhances the organismic valuing process, and becomes a
basis for authentic life review by which we can come to terms with death
and dying. Through the cultivation of mindfulness as a style of being,
the person develops attentive awareness of interoceptive feedback from
the body, which cultivates compassionate and empathic engagement
with others. As a prescription for the detached attitude of medical cul-
ture, mindfulness cultivates a phenomenological orientation by which a
relational ontology can be recovered, and an experiential revolution in
science can be borne out. Through a phenomenological orientation to
the body, an anatomy of the relational body can rediscover the circuit of
intentional consciousness linking brain, heart, and others as the basis for
science and medical practices founded on ethical responsiveness to the
suffering of the other.
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CHAPTER 2
Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial

of Death in Modern Medicine
With some consideration of the role of the cadaver in the history of

modern medicine, I aim to provoke the reader to seriously consider that
at least some medical interpretations of embodiment serve as a form of
death denial. I will point to several sources of evidence to support this
contention, including: (a) the history of cadaver dissection in Western
medicine (though, I will have more to say about this in Chapter 3),
(b) diary entries of medical students taking a course in gross anatomy
and responses to a panel on cadaver dissection I witnessed at Daemen
College, and (c) interviews with Gunther von Hagens, the creator of the
“Bodyworlds” exhibit, which features plastinated corpses for the pur-
pose of “edutainment.” In each of these cases, the evidence indicates
that medical education often works implicitly to manage death anxiety
through a set of sophisticated defense mechanisms which conceal the
nothingness of death. Namely, by making death into a concrete event,
preserved for example in the form of the cadaver or a plastinated corpse,
and by speaking rhetorically about death as a mechanical process, the
medical model of death conceals the existential terror that comes with
the lived experience of death as the termination of existence.
A key finding is that modern anatomy and medicine, by focusing on
the mechanical body of the cadaver, tend also to avoid recognition of
what I call the “memorial body” of the mourned person. The loss of dis-
tinction between the memorial body—a recollection of the lived body
of the deceased—and the cadaver has led to a tendency in medicine, and
in the larger culture, to deny the existence of the lived body. I contend
© The Author(s) 2018 19

B. D. Robbins, The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95356-1_2
20 B. D. Robbins
that this denial of the lived body serves as a form of death denial by
concealing what is, in fact, existentially lost with death: the self as lived
body nested in relationships within the living world. While it will take
several chapters to fully “flesh out” this claim, this chapter will focus on
exposing how what appears to be a sober and rational view of death as
a mechanical malfunction of the body, when viewed existentially, can
be understood, rather, as a highly advanced and typically unacknowl-
edged defense mechanism against death as an existential possibility for
ourselves.
When we look at religious worldviews that have become more mar-
ginalized in our culture, and which have been exposed to radical cri-
tiques by the likes of Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, we have
become accustomed to judging supernatural belief in the afterlife as
quaint and naïve delusions by which people protect themselves against
death anxiety and other sources of human anxiety and misery, such as
injustice or servitude. But a particularly medical version of denying death
has been too close to us—too ingrained in modern, Western conceptions
of reality—for it to be easily exposed as a similar form of death denial.
I hope to demonstrate that a “medical model” of death, however, does
serve just such a function and that this seemingly more “rational” form
of death denial is just as prone to compensatory distortions of perception
as the religious beliefs we are quick to scorn. Once we can see through
the delusions of the “medical model” of death, we’ll find ourselves in
a better position to see through other, similar distortions and delusions
of the “medical model” as it becomes applied to psychiatry. To lift the
veil on the “medical model” of death, in turn, exposes a different but
suppressed understanding of the body (and by implication, the mind),
which in turn will demonstrate some fallacies at the roots of the concep-
tual foundations of psychiatry. By exposing these fallacies, we will be bet-
ter prepared to examine a potential alternative approach to working with
people who suffer.
Death Denial
In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker (1973) postulated that identifi-
cation with human systems of meaning—in essence, culture—serves as a
buffer against death anxiety. As Becker (1973) wrote:
2 CONFRONTING THE CADAVER … 21
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing
else; it is a mainspring of human activity—designed largely to avoid the
fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final
destiny of man. (p. 11)
The awareness of mortality—matched with a strong motive for sur-

vival—necessitates the creative use of cognitive mechanisms for man-
aging, coping with, or otherwise defending against the intense fear of
death. While the individual dies, symbolic systems endure for long peri-
ods of time, if not forever. By identifying with country through patri-
otism or a religious worldview through faith, a person is afforded some
semblance of immortality.
Becker’s theory has been developed into a testable social psycholog-
ical theory called terror management theory (Greenberg, Solomon, &
Pyszczynski, 1997). According to this theory, mortality salience is pre-
dicted to trigger death anxiety, which in turn leads the person to use
conscious and/or unconscious strategies to bolster his or her sense
of self-worth and significance in face of the threat that his or her exist-
ence may lack ultimate meaning (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon,
1999). Conscious, proximal, or explicit cognitive strategies may include
thoughts about pushing the time of death back to a later date in one’s
life by, for example, imagining one’s own death occurring much later in
life during old age surrounded by loved ones. Unconscious, distal, or
implicit cognitive strategies for coping with death anxiety include cling-
ing more vehemently to one’s cultural worldview or seeking ways to
boost self-esteem. These hypotheses of terror management theory have
been tested and largely supported in over 150 different empirical studies
over the past several decades (Greenberg & Arndt, 2011).
Terror management theory is built upon the basic insight that homo
sapiens, like other living creatures, were born with a nervous system
designed to respond to dangers by mobilizing the body to take action
to cope with the threat (Greenberg & Arndt, 2011). The fight-or-flight
response, linked to activity in an important midbrain structure of the
limbic system, called the amygdala, corresponds to the subjective expe-
rience of fear and anxiety (Amaral & Adolphs, 2015; Davis & Whalen,
2001; Fox, Oler, Tromp, Fudge, & Kalin, 2015; LeDoux, 2000). The
subjective experience of fear and anxiety corresponds to felt bodily sensa-
tions of physiological activity by which the body prepares to take action
against external threats (Laird & Lacasse, 2014). The midbrain structure
22 B. D. Robbins
closely linked to emotions in response to threat, called the amygdala,

seems to play an important role in monitoring changes in our heart rate
and respiration (Khalsa, Feinstein, Adolphs, Li, & Hurlemann, 2016),
thus providing feedback to our brain about our body’s readiness to cope
with hazards that confront us. Another important structure of the cor-
tex, the insula, plays a vital role in gathering interoceptive feedback from
the felt sensations of the body, including the heart, which provides the
basis for insight into the emotions of one’s self as well as empathic res-
onance with the emotions of others (Singer, Critchley, & Preuschoff,
2009; Zaki, Davis, & Ochsner, 2012).
In fear and anxiety, we feel a pounding in our chest corresponding to
an increased heart rate, by which the supply of blood is better enabled to
usher nutrients to muscular cells to keep them moving (Ehlers, Margraf,
Roth, Taylor, & Birbaumer, 1988). We feel the clamminess of our hands
and the sweat on our brow as skin conductance increases, an indirect
indication of the body’s coolant system designed to keep the body at a
moderate temperature as it goes into action with an increased metabo-
lism, which burns energy at an increased pace (Epstein & Roupenian,
1970). We feel the rush of hormones that initiate rapid metabolism of
sugar and conversion of the body’s store of energy, which flows into the
blood to enable the muscles to make use of that energy to keep moving
and to stay strong (Rodrigues, LeDoux, & Sapolsky, 2009). For this rea-
son, stress increases blood glucose levels and impairs control of blood
sugar in diabetic patients (Halford, Cuddihy, & Mortimer, 1990). Also
in fear and anxiety, we may feel a coldness in our upper extremities as the
blood flow rushes to our lower torso and legs, to prepare the body for
flight, or perhaps as an adaptation to slow loss of blood in the event of
injury (Stemmler, Heldmann, Pauls, & Scherer, 2001). Or alternatively,
if the body prepares to fight, we may feel the heat of the blood flowing
into our upper extremities, getting them ready for enhanced grasping,
punching, and other aggressive behaviors. When flight from a threat is
our primary goal, we feel this internally as fear or anxiety. When fight is
the primary impulse, this is felt as anger or at more extreme levels, rage.
When these primitive and ancient survival mechanisms malfunc-
tion, they substantially inhibit our ability to cope with external threats
and severely impact our ability to thrive and survive in the world (Bach,
Hurlemann, & Dolan, 2015). Although sometimes fear and anxiety can
be somewhat enjoyable, considering that people seek experiences such as
horror movies, roller coasters, and hang gliding precisely because they
produce arousal by stimulating the fight-or-flight response, much of the

time, the experience can be quite unpleasant. Evolution is not particu-
larly concerned with whether or not we enjoy the experiences of anxi-
ety or anger, but merely with its capacity to keep us alive, at least long
enough for us to procreate and protect our children, better ensuring
the propagation of our selfish genes (Nesse, 2004). Propagation of self-
ish genes is primarily what drives evolution, not the hedonic, subjective
well-being of individuals.
The brain’s cortex expanded rapidly over the course of evolution,
but in humans, expansion and reorganization of the prefrontal cor-
tex afforded particular survival advantages (Semendeferi, Armstrong,
Schleicher, Zilles, & Van Hoesen, 2001). An enhanced prefrontal cor-
tex gave human beings a vastly improved capacity for problem-solving
and self-regulation of our own behavior (Fuster, 2002). This gift of
problem-solving is closely linked to the frontal lobe’s ability to project
and manage goals by which we direct and regulate our own behavior.
Enhanced self-regulation, in turn, empowers us with advantages in our
ability to manipulate and control our environments to achieve complex
and innovative ends (Passingham & Wise, 2012).
However, and this is the rub: our ability to project long-term goals
also brings with it the recognition that, eventually, our possibilities for
goal-achievement will come to end. We have an implicit understand-
ing that our ultimate possibility, death, is also the end of possibility as
we know it. At an implicit or unconscious level, this recognition of our
mortality is terrifying. So, at a conscious level, we avoid thinking about
it, or we manipulate our thoughts to make death feel less threatening
(Pyszczynski et al., 1999).
The evidence for terror management theory is compelling. Given that
medical professionals are not immune to death anxiety, and given their
exposure to death on a regular basis, we should expect to see a range
of coping mechanisms for addressing death anxiety. Indeed, research
on clinical practitioners of medicine, nurses as well as doctors, demon-
strates that death anxiety is common among health professionals (Boyle
& Carter, 1998; Kane & Hogan, 1986; Nia, Lehto, Ebadi, & Peyrovi,
2016; Servaty, Krejci, & Hayslip, 2007). If not managed well, a clini-
cian’s death anxiety can have a negative impact on the quality of the pro-
fessional’s care (Peters et al., 2017; Tolle, Elliot, & Hikam, 1984; Woo,
Kim, & Kim, 2013). In addition, the “emotional labor” of managing
the constant, ongoing confrontation with mortality, both in patients and
24 B. D. Robbins
in one’s self, can have detrimental effects on the health and well-being
of medical professionals, if not managed well (Sorensen & Iedema,
2009). Nurses seem to be particularly vulnerable to defense mechanisms
of depersonalization, detachment, and denial, and doctors are cultured
by the medical establishment into an attitude of “detached concern”
(Leiderman & Grisso, 1985; Lief & Fox, 1963; Sorensen & Iedema,
2009), which may negatively impact a physician’s ability to work through
their own emotional needs or the emotional needs of the patient and
their family (Sorensen & Iedema, 2007, 2009). As I will discuss in more
detail later, the “detached concern,” or dispassionate detachment prev-
alent in medical culture, which is central to medical training, is a likely
cultural antecedent to the Enlightenment-era emphasis upon objectivity,
by which a whole new worldview is born, including modern physics and
innovations in Renaissance art, not to mention modern anatomy.
Moreover, the profession of medicine is likely to have institutionalized
modes of discourse that shape ways of speaking, perceiving, and acting
which help physicians and other medical professionals to maintain com-
posure in the face of persistent mortality salience. Menzies (1960), for
example, observed how the nursing services of a general hospital oper-
ated as a social system to defend against anxiety. Modern medicine’s dis-
course around the cadaver helps to reveal at least some of the ways the
medical profession acts implicitly to deny the existential reality of death
and to manage the “emotional labor” associated with the confrontation
with mortality in daily, professional life.
The Concretization of Death as a Denial

of Existential Death
What is meant by “the existential reality of death”? As far as we know,

death is a great emptiness for us—a threshold beyond which we can
directly perceive nothing. Granted, we readily project our fantasies into
and live out of faiths in relation to this void. Nevertheless, that which is
beyond the threshold of death is unavailable to us in any direct or unme-
diated fashion. While many of us will be able to perceive and partici-
pate in our own process of dying—and even describe it to others while
we undergo it—we do not have access to the experience of death itself,
because to be dead is to no longer communicate to others that plenum
of experience that is so familiar and available to us now as we exist here
embodied and present to that which lies before us. To really grasp this
strange insight and to really take it in, we have to imagine that death can
never be an actuality for us. At least, it can never be an actuality for us in
this life with this body as we understand it now. My own death is an expe-
rience I can never really have. To incorporate this experience of death as a
possibility is to acknowledge the nothingness of my death. It is to say, in
effect, “My death can only be experienced as a possibility, because when it
becomes an actuality, I will no longer be there to experience it.”
To take up death as an actuality is to constitute death as a concrete
event, a real possibility that I can have. And in a certain manner of speak-
ing, as Heidegger (1962) teaches us in Being and Time, death, however,
can only ever be experienced as that which I am a being-toward. We are
always on the way to death, but to arrive there is to not be there at all.
“To be” is to be a living bodying forth of existence, and death is the loss
of this “to be.” Human being-in-the-world therefore has its existential
condition of possibility in its possibility for not-being-at-all, a possibility
which cannot be escaped and yet also a possibility that, as such, deter-
mines in an ultimate way the meaning of human being-in-the-world as a
whole. An essential aspect of being human is the existential fact that we
die, and our death reveals something important about us—that, until we
die, we exist, and beyond death, we are faced with a profound mystery.
We face the limits of our existence in death, which in turn delimits our
life as it exists in terms of a range of possibilities available to us. Death
is the point on the horizon of life where possibilities come to an end.
Like a deer erupting onto a dark and deserted wooded road, we never
know when death will lunge toward us over the oncoming horizon and
swallow our possibilities, drinking them down into an abyss of emptiness.
Yet, at the same time, in a certain manner of speaking, our possibilities
depend upon the impossible, that very emptiness, for their significance.
Any given possibility matters and makes a difference—has meaning, in
other words—because it runs the risk of not-being rather than being.
Death is at the very heart of what it means to be human.
Since death, understood ontologically, is a condition of possibility for
human existence, and only ever a possibility, when I make death into an
actuality or reduce it to some concrete, ontic event, this is a very subtle
and inescapable way of concealing death. It is, psychologically speaking,
a denial of death. But it is a form of denial that comes in many forms. In
more primitive forms, as might be witnessed especially among children,
the concretization of death often appears through the personification
26 B. D. Robbins
of death (Adams-Greenly & Moynihan, 1983). Here, death would be

conceptualized through some mythical figure, such as the grim reaper.
Among the Ancient Greeks, death was personified in the figure of
Thanatos.
In a somewhat less primitive form, death concretization may appear
through fantasies of post-death events—as would be the case when we
imagine what might happen at our own funeral. For example, some-
times suicides are motivated by revenge, particularly in cases of desperate
assertions of agency by the powerless against the oppressively power-
ful (Counts, 1984; Meng, 2002). Suicide can have a variety of motiva-
tions, including revenge, ridding one’s self of a burden, or an attempt at
rebirth into a new and better life (Maltsberger & Buie, 1980). Still, no
matter how understandable the motivations behind these acts of self-an-
nihilation, these acts nevertheless seem to rely on a certain delusion: the
misperception that the effects of one’s suicide may still be enjoyed by the
person after death. Yet, no one has such a guarantee.
My thesis is that a very advanced and sophisticated form of death
denial is also found in medicine and medical education. I am suggesting,
as well, that this form of death denial, like the above aforementioned con-
cretizations of death, also takes shape as a transformation of the onto-
logical nothingness of death—the possibility of the impossible—into the
possibility of a possible actuality. If I mistake death for a possibility—a
potential actuality—this is a very subtle way of denying the reality of
death as an impossible possibility, of an actuality that can never existen-
tially become actualized, since for it to be actualized would mean my
experience of actuality as such has evaporated. Poof, and it’s all gone. I
think medicine has a very peculiar and hidden way of making death into
an actuality, and it’s a reasonable hypothesis to say that this idiosyncratic
way of concretizing death in medicine plays an important function. It
helps doctors and nurses and other medical professionals cope with the
death and dying they face constantly on a daily basis. Without some of
coping mechanism, they would run the risk of burning out. So, let us
review quickly and make sure the line of argument is clear as a bell.
The first aspect of this thesis begins with the premise that mortal-
ity salience mobilizes people to defend against death anxiety. Medical
professionals are constantly confronted with the reality of death.
Consequently, medical professionals, who are persistently faced with the
need to cope with mortality salience, should be more likely to develop
rather sophisticated defense mechanisms for managing death anxiety.
Taking this first aspect of my thesis for granted, as supported by terror

management theory and research on clinicians in practice, my argument
will focus on the second part of my thesis: the premise that the concreti-
zation of death is an implicit, distal coping strategy for managing death
anxiety. The evidence suggests that modern medicine has a strong ten-
dency to concretize death through its concepts and images. Therefore,
embedded within the discourse of modern medicine, there are ways of
speaking and imaging death that strive to protect medical professionals
from the omnipresent bombardment of death salience and its concomi-
tant existential angst. In the case of modern medicine, this concretization
of death seems to emerge as a form of physiological reductionism which
confines the meaning of death to that of mechanical malfunction of the
anatomical body. Such a reductionism conceals the existential reality of
death as the loss of the possibility for embodied being-in-the-world. The
second thesis can be verified with an appeal to evidence in the medical
literature as well as through phenomenological description of students
working with cadavers for the first time.
Cadaver Dissection as Initiation Rite

in Medical Education
Cadaver dissection typically appears very early in medical education

and seems to serve the function of a rite of passage and initiation into
the worldview of modern medicine and its (historically and culturally)
unique conceptualization of the human body. The empirical evidence
suggests that many students experience an acute stress reaction during
their initial encounter with a cadaver in the dissecting room (Horne,
Tiller, Eizenberg, Tashavsten, & Bidale, 1990). However, the great
majority of these students adjust very quickly to the stress of the gross
anatomy course (O’Carroll, Whiten, Jackson, & Sinclair, 2002). How
do these students come to adjust to their initial stress? Research sug-
gests that the process of cadaver dissection promotes for the student a
clinical detachment, and for this reason, the experience with the cadaver
is an important part of the socialization process into the medical world
(Hafferty, 1988).
The process of coping with the cadaver and the confrontation with
death in medical education coincides with the emergence of a clini-
cal detachment, both of which are made possible by a concretization of
28 B. D. Robbins
death. This concretization of death becomes possible through a process

by which the body as it is lived through is taken up and seen through the
dead body of the cadaver. The flip side of the concretization of death is
the concretization of life. In medicine, we can find a tendency to reduce
the meaning of the living, experiential body to the body understood
through the anatomically dissected and depersonalized corpse of the
cadaver. In German, there is a grammatical distinction between the living
body (leib) and the corpse (korper), but this distinction is lost in English
translation (Leder, 1990). And this distinction is virtually absent in the
content of most variations of the gross anatomy course found in any typ-
ical medical school. Yet, it is obvious enough: A corpse does not have
experiences, but living human bodies do.
The living body is an opening onto a world of sentient awareness,
situated within the context of a network of meaningful projects and in
relation to significant others—a living, pulsating world of meaningful
possibilities which is precisely what is lost with death. When through the
image of the cadaver the living body is conceptually reduced to a deper-
sonalized, anatomical and mechanical corpse, this means the lived body
has been repressed or put out of play. The living body becomes concre-
tized, and to the extent that the living body is made concrete, death too
becomes concretized.
When life becomes reducible to a biomechanical, cause-and-effect
chain of events situated within a physical space of objects externally
related to each other—reduced, in other words, to a corpse—then we
miss the way in which our lived experience is a bodying forth of a range
of possibilities which are actualized through time. Death too gets trans-
formed from its ontological status as the possibility of having no more
possibilities. Death then becomes reduced to an actuality that medical
technology promises to manage and control with increasing knowledge
and efficiency. To live death in this concrete way is to engage in a very
subtle and implicit form of death denial. Perhaps this is why medical pro-
fessionals have a difficult time accepting death and will often, instead,
pursue with patients unnecessary and costly interventions to extend life
(Jones, Moga, & Davie, 1999). When death is understood primarily as
mechanical malfunction, then all one can do is keep fixing the machine.
Yet when death is understood as inextricably part of, and essential to, the
structure of human existence, there is room for both genuine anxiety in
the face of annihilation and also a place for coming to terms with death
through genuine acceptance of our ultimate fate. One cannot find one’s
self bereaved before a cadaver; but the memorial body can be mourned.
Think of the dead body at the funeral of a loved one. When my father
died, I remember looking at his corpse in the coffin, and what I saw
there was a figment of the person he had once been. His body served
as a memorial of his past life. Within the context of the funeral parlor,
his body was a memorial body. Now, contrast this image of my father,
or your deceased loved one, with the cadaver in the dissection room of
medical school. Initially, the face of the cadaver is concealed by cloth.
The students come to forget the memorial body of the cadaver lying on
the table. They are asked, in effect, to exchange their experience of the
person’s memorial body with the experience of a cadaver as a fascinating
machine, a tool for learning. Some students find this transition more dif-
ficult than others. It only takes a small reminder—a touch of nail polish,
a tattoo, etc.—to bring the student back to the memorial body of the
cadaver. But medicine has nothing to say about this memorial body.
If we look to the history of cadaver dissection, we find a similar ambi-
guity at play (van den Berg, 1978). For example, we can examine the
fourteenth-century drawing of a dissection by Guy de Parc (see Fig. 2.1).1
It was taken from a text by the physician Vigevano. Here, we can see the
physician making the first incision into the cadaver’s abdomen. And
where does he look? Into the eyes of the cadaver. Does he search for
signs of life? Does he expect a wince of pain as he cuts into the flesh of
the body? We cannot know for certain, but it seems clear that for this
physician, the body retains many of the features of the memorial body.
The cadaver is more than a cadaver; it is also the desiccated shell of a for-
mer soul.
On the other hand, less than a century later, dissection in art reveals
a different physician, represented well by Andrea Vesalius, who is the
grandfather of modern anatomy (see Fig. 2.2).2 In a famous self-portrait
of Vesalius, we can see that he is not looking into the eyes of the corpse;
instead, he gazes at us. He seems to be proudly inviting us in to marvel
at his work—the carved arm from which flesh has been stripped away to
reveal muscle and nerves. But, if we look more carefully, we can notice
something very strange about this body. This is not a memorial body
at all. It appears to be a living person, standing by Vesalius’s side, with
his face concealed. Vesalius is the inventor of modern anatomical dis-
section—dissection which he performed upon dead bodies. But in this
image from 1542, we find next to him not the body of the deceased
30 B. D. Robbins
Fig. 2.1 Plate XXXI from the manuscript of Guy de Vigevano of 1345 at
Chantilly
but the body of the living—the body of the living now transformed and
figured through a different style of vision—a vision which confuses and
conceals the difference between the body of the living and the body of
the dead. Here, Vesalius’s style of vision conceals death and concretizes it
so that he no longer trembles like Guy de Parc before a deceased friend;
instead, the living body has been concretized into the mechanical body
of his anatomical vision, an anatomical vision that has turned away from
the memorial body and, in that motion, has also turned from the imme-
diate perception of death’s possibility. His corpses do not just lie there;
Fig. 2.2 Vesalius, page xxi of De human corporis fabrica (1543 edition)
32 B. D. Robbins
they are reanimated like Frankenstein’s monster—and, wearing their

shorn flesh proudly, they dance (see Fig. 2.3).3
Is it too far-fetched to say that a man of genius like Vesalius is suf-
fering a form of death denial? But we are not restricted to an analysis of
Vesalius and his drawings. Today, the modern Vesalius has arrived, and
his name is Gunther von Hagens—the man who invented the process
of plastination, a technique of preserving bodies which permits him to
put them on display (von Hagens, Tiedemann, & Kriz, 1987). His show,
called BodyWorlds, has now traveled the world and within the past year
has been available to the curious patrons of science centers across our
nation (Burns, 2000; Stone, 2011). He refers to his work as “edutain-
ment”—a cross between education and entertainment, by which the
public can now see what before had been hidden behind the closed
doors of the dissecting room. Now, the anatomical body has emerged
from the secret chambers of medical school and is available for mass
consumption. And, just like Vesalius, his cadavers do not just lie there;
he puts them into motion; these are animated corpses: horseback rid-
ers, basketball players, and mothers whose most private interior places
have been exposed for all to see. In one of his most famous pieces, von
Hagens paid homage to Vesalius by repeating one of Vesalius’ most
famous images—a corpse holding up his own flesh. But what Vesalius
only dared to render as an anatomical drawing, von Hagens makes
available to us as an actual human body, plastinated, posed and put on
display.
Gunther von Hagens is acutely aware that his work confuses and
obscures the line between life and death. As he said in a recent interview,
“I actually try to bring my specimens as near as possible to life by nar-
rowing the gap between life and death…” (McNeill, 2017, n.p.). More
strikingly, he actively seeks donors, and in his campaigns to persuade
people to offer their bodies to him, he claims to offer them a second life.
“I…see body donation for plastination as a kind of second life experi-
ence,” he wrote. “We always like to have new opportunities in life. Why
shouldn’t we have more opportunities after death?” (Bloch, 2000, n.p.).
Dead bodies of course cannot have opportunities. To have opportu-
nities, we must have possibilities, and dead people no longer have pos-
sibilities. They are dead. But von Hagens, like Vesalius before him, has
momentarily lost sight of that distinction between death as a possibility
and death as an actuality. Through his plastinated corpses, he has concre-
tized death, and he has weaved such an incredible illusion, he has even
convinced himself of its magic.
Fig. 2.3 Anatomical drawing from page 174 of De human corporis fabrica by
Vesalius
34 B. D. Robbins
If we look to the dissection rooms of medical schools, we find similar

examples of death concretization. As I mentioned previously, proponents
of cadaver dissection in medical school have argued correctly that the
experience of gross anatomy is a key component for the development of
clinical detachment among medical students. But taken too far, clinical
detachment can result in the atrophy of the physician’s human capacity
for empathy—a quality that is often in short supply among graduates of
medical school, as some empirical evidence suggests is the case.
I will have much more to say about the erosion of empathy in med-
ical school, but, for the sake of illustration, for now, I will offer only
one anecdotal example. In the fall of 2005, medical students gathered
together for a panel discussion on the gross anatomy experience, and
students on the panel discussed their first experiences working with a
cadaver. One student described her initial trepidation as she anticipated
her first cut into the cadaver’s flesh. Like Vigevano in Guy de Parc’s
drawing, this student stood before a memorial body and trembled in
awe before it. But as she explained, once that first cut was made and her
virginity was broken, that memorial body soon vanished—and she grew
increasingly fascinated by the marvelous architecture of the human form.
And, then, like Vesalius, she began to lose sight of that subtle distinction
between the body of the living and the body of the dead. And this is
why she could innocently tell her mother at the breakfast table, “I would
love to dissect your body, Mom!” She would love to dissect her mother’s
body, she said, in order to witness her mother’s mangled spinal column.
It hadn’t occurred to her that, for her wish to come true, her mother
would have to die. I can think of no better illustration of death’s con-
cretization through the reduction of the living and memorial bodies into
the single body of the anatomical, medicalized corpse it had become to
her. And what a wonderfully subtle denial of death it was.
On that same panel sat a future donor, who knew all too well that he
did not have long to live. An audience member asked him why he had
decided to donate his body. Echoing the words of Gunther von Hagens,
the donor explained that he did it in order to have a second life—so that
when he died, he could continue at least to give something back to the
world of the living. And this was very touching to hear from this man
who was facing death. But what I found most remarkable was his plea to
the medical professionals and especially to the educators in the audience:
He did not want to be forgotten. Do not conceal my face, do not hide
my name; tattoo my name on my back, he said; I want you to remember
me. And, as I heard him say those words, I realized that he was asking
for those students, as they explore the flesh of his body, that they pay
him the respect to see his body not only for the fascinating machine that
it is, and was, but also to preserve his memorial body—to make his body
into a memory of the person he was and to honor the gift of his body to
their education.
What the physician, educator and student forget, the donor reminds
us. The memorial body can be concealed, but he cannot be repressed for
ever. A painted fingernail. A piercing. A tattoo on the back. These things
are reminders of a life past; they signal the re-emergence of that memo-
rial body, calling out to the student: “Do not forget. Where you are, I
once was. Where I am now, you will be.”4
Lessons from the Dead

My observations on death denial in medicine became a fascination,
which ultimately led me to embark on a more systematic, empirical inves-
tigation of the matter. A friend and colleague at Daemen College, Dr.
Gary Styn, who taught gross anatomy with cadavers, allowed me access
to his classroom and to his consenting students who agreed to par-
ticipate in a study of their experience in the class. My student, Ashley
Tomaka, assisted me with the study through ethnographic observations
of the classroom, where she took extensive field notes. Students were
asked to write journal entries at key time points in the course, both prior
to and after the start of cadaver dissection. Faculty in the Physician’s
Assistant program, Cara Innus and Joel Patterson, provided invaluable
guidance and feedback. I took the ethnographic field notes and journal
entries and submitted them to a careful qualitative analysis and presented
the results at the International Human Science Research Conference
in Trento, Italy. After incorporating feedback from the audience at the
conference, we went on to publish the study a year later in the jour-
nal, Omega: Journal of Death and Dying (Robbins, Tomaka, Innus,
Patterson, & Styn, 2008).
Our study yielded several key findings that we found quite illuminat-
ing. In general, students were initially anxious prior to the dissection of
the cadaver, but they quickly adjusted to the task. The stress very quickly
yielded to a combination of fascination before the body of the deceased
and the challenge of mastering a new language of anatomy to describe
what they were seeing. Students in some cases also described a range
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CHAPTER XXI.
Mr. Sheringham is Dramatic
Long after Alec’s not altogether willing departure, Roger sat
smoking and thinking. On the whole, he was not sorry to be alone.
Alec was proving a somewhat discouraging companion in this
business. Evidently his heart was not in it; and for one so situated
the ferreting out of facts and the general atmosphere of suspicion
and distrust that is inevitably attendant on such a task, must be
singularly distasteful. Roger could not blame Alec for his undisguised
reluctance to see the thing through, but he also could not help
thinking somewhat wistfully of the enthusiastic and worshipping
prototypes whose mantle Alec was at first supposed to have
inherited. Roger felt that he could have welcomed a little enthusiasm
and worshipping at the end of this eventful and very strenuous day.
He began to try to arrange methodically in his mind the data they
had collected. First with regard to the murderer. He had made an
effective escape from the house only, in all probability as it seemed,
to enter it again by another way. Why? Either because he lived there,
or because he wished to communicate with somebody who did.
Which of these? Heaven only knew!
He tried another line of attack. Which of the minor puzzles still
remained unsolved? Chiefly, without doubt, the sudden change of
attitude on the part of Mrs. Plant and Jefferson before lunch. But why
need they have been apprehensive at all, if the murderer had been
able to communicate with them after the crime had been committed?
Perhaps the interview had been a hurried one, and he had forgotten
to reassure them on some particularly vital point. Yet he had been
able to do so in the course of the next morning. This meant that, up
till lunch time at any rate, he had still been in the neighbourhood.
More than that, actually on the premises, as it seemed. Did this point
more definitely to the probability of his being one of the household? It
seemed feasible; but who? Jefferson? Possibly, though there were
several difficult points to get over if this were the case. The women
were obviously out of the question. The butler? Again possibly; but
why on earth should the man want to murder his master?
Yet the butler was a strange figure, there was no getting away
from that. And as far as Roger could judge, there had been no love
lost between him and Stanworth. Yes, there was undoubtedly a
mystery of some kind connected with that butler. Jefferson’s
explanation of why Mr. Stanworth should have employed a prize-
fighting butler did not strike one as quite satisfactory.
Then why had Mrs. Plant been crying in the library? Roger strove
to remember some scenes in which she and Stanworth had been
thrown into contact. How had they behaved towards each other?
Had they seemed friendly, or the reverse? As far as he could
recollect, Stanworth had treated her with the same casual good-
fellowship which he showed to everybody; while she—— Yes, now
he came to think of it, she had never appeared to be on particularly
good terms with him. She had been quiet and reserved when he was
in the room. Not that she was really ever anything else but quiet and
reserved under any circumstances; but yes, there had been a subtle
change in her manner when he was about. Obviously she had
disliked him.
Clearly there was only one hope for finding the answer to these
riddles, and that was to investigate Stanworth’s affairs. In all
probability even that would prove futile; but as far as Roger could
see there was no other way to try with even a moderate chance of
success. And while he was racking his brains out here, Jefferson
was sitting in the morning room surrounded by documents which
Roger would give anything to see.
A sudden idea occurred to him. Why not beard the lion in his den
and offer to give Jefferson a hand with his task? In any case, that
would form a direct challenge, the answer to which could not fail to
be interesting.
With Roger to think was, in nine cases out of ten, to leap into
precipitate action. Almost before the thought had completed its
passage through his mind, he was on his feet and striding eagerly
towards the house.
Without troubling to knock he burst open the door of the morning
room and walked in. Jefferson was seated in front of the table in the
centre of the room, surrounded, as Roger’s mind’s eye had seen
him, with papers and documents. Lady Stanworth was not present.
He glanced up as Roger entered.
“Hullo, Sheringham,” he said in some surprise. “Anything I can do
for you?”
“Well, I was smoking out there in the garden with nothing to do,”
Roger remarked with a friendly smile, “when it occurred to me that
instead of wasting my time like that I might be giving you a hand
here; you said you were up to the eyes in it. Is there anything I can
do to help?”
“Damned good of you,” Jefferson replied, a little awkwardly, “but I
don’t really think there’s anything. I’m trying to tabulate a statement
of his financial position. Something like that is sure to be wanted
when the will’s proved, or whatever the rigmarole is.”
“Well, surely there’s something I can do to help you out, isn’t
there?” Roger asked, sitting on a corner of the table. “Add up
tremendous columns of figures, or something like that?”
Jefferson hesitated and glanced round at the papers in front of
him. “Well,” he said slowly.
“Of course if there’s anything particularly private in Stanworth’s
affairs——!” Roger remarked airily.
Jefferson looked up quickly. “Private? There’s nothing particularly
private about them. Why should there be?”
“Then make use of me by all means, my dear chap. I’m at a loose
end, and only too glad to give you a hand.”
“Of course if you put it like that, I should be only too pleased,”
Jefferson replied, though not without a certain reluctance. “H’m! I
was just wondering what would be the best job for you to tackle.”
“Oh, anything that comes along, you know.”
“Well, look here, I tell you what you might do,” Jefferson said
suddenly. “I want a statement made out showing his holdings in the
various companies of which he was a director, with the approximate
value of the shares, their yield for the last financial year, his director’s
fees, and all the rest of it. Manage that, could you?”
“Like a shot,” said Roger with great cheerfulness, concealing his
disappointment at the comparative unimportance of the task allotted
to him. Such details as these could be obtained from any work of
reference on the subject; he had hoped for a little insight into
something that was rather less public property.
Still, half a bun was better than no cake, and he settled down at
the opposite side of the table and set to work willingly enough on the
data with which Jefferson supplied him. From time to time he tried to
peep surreptitiously at some of the documents in which the latter
was immersed, but Jefferson was guarding them too jealously and
Roger could obtain no clear idea of their contents.
An hour later he sat back in his chair with a sigh of relief.
“There you are! And a very charming and comprehensive
statement, too.”
“Thanks very much,” Jefferson said, taking the statement which
Roger was holding out to him. “Damned good of you, Sheringham.
Saved me a lot of trouble. And you’ve done it in about a quarter of
the time I should have taken. Not my sort of line, this game.”
“So I should imagine,” Roger observed with studied
carelessness. “In fact, it’s always surprised me that you should have
taken a job like this secretaryship on at all. I should have put you
down as a typical open-air man, if you’ll allow me to say so. The type
of Englishman that won our colonies for us, you know.”
“No option,” Jefferson said, with a return to his usual curt manner.
“Not my choice, I assure you. Had to take what I could jolly well get.”
“Rotten, I know,” Roger replied sympathetically, watching the
other curiously. In spite of himself and what he felt he knew he could
not help a mild liking for this abrupt, taciturn person; a typical soldier
of the wordless, unsocial school. It struck Roger at that moment that
Jefferson, whom he had been inclined to regard at first as something
of a sinister figure, was in reality nothing of the sort. The man was
shy, exceedingly shy, and he endeavoured to hide this shyness
behind a brusque, almost rude manner; and as always in such a
case, this had produced an entirely mistaken first impression of the
man himself behind the manner. Jefferson was downright; but it was
the downrightness of honesty, Roger felt, not of villainy.
Roger began, half unconsciously, to rearrange some of his ideas.
If Jefferson was concerned in Stanworth’s death, then it would be
because there was a very excellent reason for that death. All the
more reason to probe into Stanworth’s affairs.
“Going to stay down here long, Jefferson?” he asked, with an
obvious yawn.
“Not very. Just got to finish off this job I’m on now. You turn in.
Must be getting pretty late.”
Roger glanced at his watch. “Close on twelve. Right, I think I will,
if you’re sure there’s nothing else I can do?”
“Nothing, thanks. I shall have a go at it before breakfast myself.
Got to get cleared up in here by eleven. Well, good-night,
Sheringham, and many thanks.”
Roger sought his room in a state of some perplexity. This new
conclusion of his with regard to Jefferson was going to make things
very much more complicated instead of more simple. He felt a strong
sympathy with Jefferson all of a sudden. He was not a clever man;
certainly he was not the brains of the conspiracy. What must his
feelings be when he knew, as indeed he must know, that Roger was
tracking out things that would, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred
and with only very ordinary luck, have remained undiscovered for
ever? How must he regard the net which he could see spread to
catch him, and with him—whom?
Roger dragged a chair up to the open window, and sat down with
his feet on the sill. He felt he was getting maudlin. This had every
appearance of a thoroughly cold-blooded crime, and here he was
feeling sorry already for one of its chief participants. Yet it was
because Jefferson, as he saw now that the scales had suddenly
fallen from his eyes, was such a fine type of man—the tall, thin,
small-headed type that is the real pioneer of our race—and because
he himself genuinely liked all three members of that suspicious trio,
that Roger, without necessarily giving way to maudlin sentiment, was
yet unable to stifle his very real regret that everything should point so
decisively to their guilt.
Still, it was too late to back out now. He owed it to himself, if not
even to them, to see the thing through. Roger could sympathise
more fully now with Alec’s feelings on the matter. Curious that he
should after all have come round in the end to that much-derided
point of view of Alec’s!
He began to review the personal element in the light of this new
revelation. How did it help? If Jefferson was an honest man and
would only kill because nothing short of killing would meet some
unknown case, then what was most likely to have produced such a
state of affairs? What is the mainspring that actuates three quarters
of such drastic deeds? Well, the answer to that was obvious enough.
A woman.
How did that apply in this case? Could Jefferson be in love with
some woman, whose happiness or peace had been threatened in
some mysterious way by Stanworth himself, and if so, who was the
woman? Lady Stanworth? Mrs. Plant? Roger uttered an involuntary
exclamation. Mrs. Plant!
That, at any rate, would fit in with some of the puzzling facts. The
powder on the arm of the couch, for instance, and the wet
handkerchief.
Roger’s imagination began to ride free. Mrs. Plant was in the
library with Stanworth; he was bullying her, or something. Perhaps
he was trying to force some course of action upon her which was
repugnant to her. In any case, she weeps and implores him. He is
adamant. She hides her face against the arm of the couch and goes
on weeping. Jefferson enters, sees at a glance what is happening
and kills Stanworth in the madness of his passion with as little
compunction as one would feel towards a rat. Mrs. Plant looks on in
horror; tries to interfere, perhaps, but without effect. As soon as the
thing is done she becomes as cool as ice and sets the stage for
suicide.
Roger jumped to his feet and leaned out over the sill.
“It fits!” he murmured excitedly. “It all fits in!”
Glancing downwards, he noticed that the morning-room light had
been extinguished and made a note of the time. It was past one. He
sank back in his chair and began to consider whether the other
pieces of the puzzle would slip as neatly into this general scene—the
safe incident, the change of attitude, Lady Stanworth, and so on. No,
this was not going to be quite so easy.
At the end of the hour he was still uncertain. The main outline still
seemed convincing enough, but all the details appeared hardly so
glib.
“I’m getting addled,” he murmured aloud, as he rose from the
chair. “Better give this side of it a rest for a little.”
He made his way softly out of the room and crept along the
passage to Alec’s bedroom.
Alec sat abruptly up in bed as the door opened.
“That you, Roger?” he demanded.
“No, this is Jefferson,” Roger said, hastily shutting the door
behind him. “And very nicely you’d have given things away if it had
been, Alexander Watson. And you might try and moderate your voice
a bit. The sound of a foghorn in the middle of the night is bound to
make people wonder. Ready?”
Alec got out of bed and put on his dressing-gown.
“Right-ho.”
As quietly as possible they stole downstairs and into the morning
room. Roger drew the thick curtains together carefully before
switching on the light.
“Now for it!” he breathed excitedly, eyeing the crowded table with
eagerness. “That little pile there I’ve already been through, so you
needn’t bother about those.”
“Already?” Alec asked in surprise.
“Yes, in company with my excellent friend, Major Jefferson,”
Roger grinned, and proceeded to explain what he had been doing.
“You’ve got some cheek,” Alec commented with a smile.
“Yes, and I’ve got something more than that,” Roger retorted.
“I’ve got a thoroughly sound working idea as to who killed Stanworth
and under what circumstances. I can tell you, friend Alec, I’ve been
uncommonly busy these last two hours or so.”
“You have?” said Alec eagerly. “Tell me.”
Roger shook his head. “Not at the moment,” he said, sitting down
in Jefferson’s chair. “Let’s get this little job safely done first. Now look
here, you go through these miscellaneous documents, will you? I
want to study the passbooks first of all. And I’ll tell you one thing I’ve
discovered. The income from those various businesses of his didn’t
amount to a quarter of what he must have been spending. He
cleared just over two thousand out of all five of them last year, and I
should say that he’s been living at the rate of at least ten thousand a
year. And besides all that, he’s been investing heavily as well. Where
does all the extra cash come from? That’s what I want to find out.”
Alec began to wade obediently through the sheaf of papers that
Roger had indicated, while the latter picked out the passbooks and
glanced at them.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Two of these accounts are in his
own name, and the other three appear to be in three different
names. Jefferson never said anything about that. Now I wonder what
the devil that means?”
He began to pore over them methodically, and for some time
there was silence in the room. Then Roger looked up with a frown.
“I don’t understand these at all,” he said slowly. “The dividends
are all shown in his own two passbooks, and various checks and so
on; but the other three seem to be made up entirely of cash
payments, on the credit side at any rate. Listen to this: Feb. 9th,
£100; Feb. 17th, £500; Mar. 12th, £200; Mar. 28th, £350; and then
April 9th, £1,000. What on earth do you make of that? All in cash,
and such nice round sums. Why a thousand pounds in cash?”
“Seems funny, certainly,” Alec agreed.
Roger picked up another of the books, and flicked the pages
through carefully.
“This is just the same sort of thing. Hullo, here’s an entry of
£5,000 paid in cash. £5,000 in cash! Now why? What does it mean?
Does your pile throw any light on it?”
“No, these are only business letters. There doesn’t appear to be
anything out of the ordinary here at all.”
Roger still held the book mechanically in his hand, but he was
staring blankly at the wall.
“Nothing but cash,” he murmured softly; “all sorts of sums
between £10 and £5,000; each sum a multiple of ten, or some other
round figure; no shillings or pence; and cash! That’s what worries
me. Why cash? I can’t find a single check marked on the credit side
of these three books. And where in the name of goodness did all this
cash come from? There’s absolutely nothing to account for it, as far
as I can make out. It’s not the proceeds of any sort of business,
apparently. Besides, the debit side shows nothing but checks drawn
to self. He paid it in as cash and he drew it out himself. Now what on
earth does all this mean?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Alec helplessly.
Roger stared at the wall in silence for a few minutes. Suddenly,
his mouth opened, and he whistled softly.
“By—Jove!” he exclaimed, transferring his gaze to Alec. “I believe
I’ve got it. And doesn’t it simplify things, too? Yes, it must be right. It
makes everything as clear as daylight. Good lord! Well, I’m damned!”
“Out with it, then!”
Roger paused impressively. This was the most dramatic moment
he had yet encountered, and he was not going to spoil it by any
undue precipitation.
He smote the table softly with his fist by way of preparation.
Then:
“Old Stanworth was a professional blackmailer!” he said in vibrant
tones.
CHAPTER XXII.
Mr. Sheringham Solves the Mystery
It was past ten o’clock on the following morning, and Roger and
Alec were engaged in taking a constitutional in the rose garden after
breakfast before the inquest proceedings opened. Roger had
refused to say anything further on the previous evening—or, rather,
in the small hours of the same morning. All he had done was to
remark that it was quite time they were in bed, and that he wanted a
clear head before discussing the affair in the light of this new
revelation of Stanworth’s character. He remarked this not once, but
many times; and Alec had perforce to be contented with it.
Now, with pipes in full blast, they were preparing to go further into
the matter.
Roger himself was complacently triumphant.
“Mystery?” he repeated, in answer to a question of Alec’s. “There
isn’t any mystery now. I’ve solved it.”
“Oh, I know the mystery about Stanworth is cleared up,” said Alec
impatiently; to tell the truth, Roger in this mood irritated him not a
little. “That is, if your explanation is the right one, which I’m not
disputing at the moment.”
“Thank you very much.”
“But what about the mystery of his death? You can’t have solved
that.”
“On the contrary, Alexander,” Roger rejoined, with a satisfied
smile; “that is exactly what I have done.”
“Oh? Then who killed him?”
“If you want it in a single word,” Roger said, not without a certain
reluctance, “Jefferson.”
“Jefferson?” Alec exclaimed. “Oh, rot!”
Roger glanced at him curiously. “Now that’s interesting,” he
commented. “Why do you say ‘rot’ like that?”
“Because——” Alec hesitated. “Oh, I don’t know. It seems such
rot to think of Jefferson committing a murder, I suppose. Why?”
“You mean, you don’t think it’s the sort of thing he would do?”
“I certainly don’t!” Alec returned with emphasis.
“Do you know, Alec, I’m beginning to think you’re a better judge
of character than I am. It’s a humiliating confession, but there you
are. Tell me, have you always thought that about Jefferson, or only
just recently?”
Alec considered. “Ever since this business cropped up, I think. It
always seemed fantastic to me that Jefferson could be mixed up with
it. And the two women as well, for that matter. No, Roger, if you’re
trying to fix it on Jefferson, I’m quite sure you’re making a bad
mistake.”
Roger’s complacency was unshaken.
“If the case were an ordinary one, no doubt,” he replied. “But
you’ve got to remember that this isn’t. Stanworth was a blackmailer,
and that alters everything. You may murder an ordinary man, but you
execute a blackmailer. That is, if you don’t kill him on the spur of the
moment, carried away by madness or exasperation. You’d do that
sort of thing on your own account, wouldn’t you? Well, how much
more so are you going to do it on behalf of a woman, and that a
woman with whom you’re in love? I tell you, Alec, the whole thing is
as plain as a pikestaff.”
“Meaning that Jefferson is in love?”
“Precisely.”
“Who with?”
“Mrs. Plant.”
Alec gasped. “Good Lord, how on earth do you know that?” he
asked incredulously.
“I don’t,” Roger replied with a pleased air. “But he must be. It’s
the only explanation. I deduced it.”
“The devil you did!”
“Yes, I’d arrived at that conclusion even before we discovered the
secret of Stanworth’s hidden life. That clears up absolutely
everything.”
“Does it? I admit it seems to make some of the things more
understandable, but I’m dashed if I can see how it makes you so
sure that Jefferson killed him.”
“I’ll explain,” Roger said kindly. “Jefferson was secretly in love
with Mrs. Plant. For some reason or other Mrs. Plant was being
blackmailed by Stanworth unknown to Jefferson. He has a midnight
interview with her in the library and demands money. She weeps and
implores him (hence the dampness of the handkerchief) and lays a
face on the arm of the couch as women do (hence the powder in that
particular place). Stanworth is adamant; he must have money. She
says she hasn’t got any money. All right, says Stanworth, hand your
jewels over then. She goes and gets her jewels and gives them to
him. Stanworth opens the safe and tells her that is where he keeps
his evidence against her. Then he locks the jewels up and tells her
she can go. Enter Jefferson unexpectedly, takes in the situation at a
glance, and goes for Stanworth bald-headed. Stanworth fires at him
and misses, hitting the vase. Jefferson grabs his wrist, forces the
revolver round and pulls the trigger, thus shooting Stanworth with his
own revolver without relaxing the other’s grip on it. Mrs. Plant is
horror-struck; but, seeing that the thing is done, she takes command
of the situation and arranges the rest. And that,” Roger concluded,
with a metaphorical pat on his own back, “is the solution of the
peculiar events at Layton Court.”
“Is it?” Alec said, with less certainty. “It’s a very pretty little story,
no doubt, and does great credit to your imagination. But as to being
the solution—well, I’m not so sure about that.”
“It seems to me to account for pretty well everything,” Roger
retorted. “But you always were difficult to please, Alec. Think. The
broken vase and the second bullet; how the murder was committed;
the fact that the murderer went back into the house again; the
agitation about the safe being opened; Mrs. Plant’s behaviour in the
morning, her reluctance to give evidence (in case she let out
anything of what really happened, you see), and her fright when I
sprang on her the fact that I knew she’d been in the library, after all;
the disappearance of the footprints; the presence of the powder and
the dampness of the handkerchief; Lady Stanworth’s indifference to
her brother-in-law’s death (I expect he had some hold over her, too,
if the truth were known); the employment of a prize-fighter as a
butler, obviously a measure of self-protection; the fact that I heard
people moving about late that night; everything! All cleared up and
explained.”
“Humph!” said Alec noncommittally.
“Well, can you find a single flaw in it?” Roger asked, in some
exasperation.
“If it comes to that,” Alec replied slowly, “why was it that both Mrs.
Plant and Jefferson suddenly had no objection to the safe being
opened, after they’d both shown that they were anxious to prevent
it?”
“Easy!” Roger retorted. “While we were upstairs, Jefferson
opened the safe and took out the documents. It would only take a
minute, after all. Any objection to that?”
“Did the inspector leave the keys behind? I thought he put them
in his pocket.”
“No, he left them on the table, and Jefferson put them in his
pocket. I remember noticing that at the time, and wondering why he
did it. Now it’s obvious, of course.”
“Well, what about that little pile of ashes in the library hearth? You
suggested that it might be the remains of some important
documents, and you thought that Jefferson looked uncommonly
relieved at the idea.”
“My mistake at the time,” Roger said promptly. “As for the ashes,
they might have been anything. I don’t attach any importance to
them.”
“But you did!” Alec persisted obstinately.
“Yes, excellent but sponge-headed Alexander,” Roger explained
patiently, “because I thought at first that they were important. Now I
see that I was mistaken, and they aren’t. Are you beginning to grasp
the idea?”
“Well, tell me this, then,” Alec said suddenly. “Why the dickens
didn’t Jefferson get the documents out of the safe directly after
Stanworth’s death, instead of waiting till the next morning and getting
so agitated about it?”
“Yes, I thought of that. Presumably because they were both so
flustered at what had happened that they forgot all about the
documents in their anxiety to cover up their traces and get away.”
Alec sniffed slightly. “Rather unlikely that, isn’t it? Not natural, as
you’re always so fond of saying.”
“Unlikely things do happen sometimes, however. This one did, for
instance.”
“Then you’re absolutely convinced that Jefferson killed
Stanworth, and that’s how it all happened, are you?”
“I am, Alexander.”
“Oh!”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“No,” Alec said uncompromisingly. “I’m not.”
“But dash it all, I’ve proved it to you. You can’t shove all my
proofs on one side in that off-hand way. The whole thing stands to
reason. You can’t get away from it.”
“If you say that Jefferson killed Stanworth,” Alec proceeded with
obstinate deliberation, “then I’m perfectly sure you’re wrong. That’s
all.”
“But why?”
“Because I don’t believe he did,” said Alec, with an air of great
wisdom. “He’s not the sort of fellow to do a thing like that. I suppose
I’ve got a sort of intuition about it,” he added modestly.
“Intuition be hanged!” Roger retorted, with a not unjustified
irritation. “You can’t back your blessed intuition against proofs like
the ones I’ve just given you.”
“But I do,” Alec said simply. “Every time,” he added, with a careful
attention to detail.
“Then I wash my hands of you,” said Roger shortly.
For a time they paced side by side in silence. Alec appeared to
be pondering deeply, and Roger was undisguisedly huffy. After all, it
is a little irksome to solve in so ingenious yet so convincing a way a
problem of such apparently mysterious depth, only to be brought up
against a blank wall of disbelief founded on so unstable a foundation
as mere intuition. One’s sympathy is certainly with Roger at that
moment.
“Well, anyhow, what are you going to do about it?” Alec asked,
after some minutes’ reflection. “Surely you’re not going to tell the
police without troubling to verify anything further, are you?”
“Of course not. In fact, I haven’t made up my mind whether I shall
tell the police at all yet.”
“Oh!”
“It depends largely on what the two of them—Jefferson and Mrs.
Plant—have to tell me.”
“So you’re going to tackle them about it, are you?”
“Of course.”
There was another short silence.
“Are you going to see them together?” Alec asked.
“No, I shall speak to Mrs. Plant first, I think. There are one or two
minor points I want to clear up before I see Jefferson.”
Alec reflected again. “I shouldn’t, Roger, if I were you,” he said
quite earnestly.
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Speak to either of them about it. You’re not at all sure whether
you’re really right or not; after all, it’s only guesswork from beginning
to end, however brilliant guesswork.”
“Guesswork!” Roger repeated indignantly. “There isn’t any
guesswork about it! It’s——”
“Yes, I know; you’re going to say it’s deduction. Well, you may be
right or you may not; the thing’s too deep for me. But shall I tell you
what I think about it? I think you’d be wise to drop the whole thing
just as it is. You think you’ve solved it; and perhaps you have. Why
not be content with that?”
“But why this change of mind, Alexander?”
“It isn’t a change of mind. You know I’ve never been keen on it
from the very beginning. But now that Stanworth’s turned out to be
such a skunk, why——”
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Roger said softly. “You mean that if
Jefferson did kill Stanworth, he was perfectly right to do so and we
ought to let him get away with it, don’t you?”
“Well,” Alec said awkwardly, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,
but——”
“But I don’t know that I wouldn’t,” Roger interrupted. “That’s why I
said just now that I hadn’t decided whether I’d tell the police or not. It
all depends on whether things did happen as I imagine, or not. But
the thing is, I must find out.”
“But must you?” Alec said slowly. “As things are at present,
whatever you may think, you don’t actually know. And if you do find
out for certain, it seems to me that you’ll be deliberately saddling
yourself with a responsibility which you might wish then that you
hadn’t been so jolly eager to adopt.”
“If it comes to that, Alec,” Roger retorted, “I should have said that
to take no steps to find out the truth now we’re so near it is
deliberately to shirk that very responsibility. Wouldn’t you?”
Alec was silent for a moment.
“Hang that!” he said with sudden energy. “Leave things as they
are, Roger. There are some things of which it’s better that everyone
should remain in ignorance. Don’t go and find out a lot of things that
you’d give anything afterwards not to have discovered.”
Roger laughed lightly. “Oh, I know it’s the right thing to say, ‘Who
am I to take the responsibility of judging you? No, it is not for me to
do so. I will hand you over to the police, which means that you will
inevitably be hanged. It’s a pity, because my personal opinion is that
your case is not murder, but justifiable homicide; and I know that a
jury, directed by a judge with his eye on the asinine side of the law,
would never be allowed to take that view. That’s why I so much
regret having myself to place a halter round your neck by handing
you over to the police. But how is such a one as me to judge you?’
That’s what they always say in storybooks, isn’t it? But don’t you
worry, Alec. I’m not a spineless nincompoop like that, and I’m not in
the least afraid of taking the responsibility of judging a case on its
own merits; in fact, I consider that I’m very much more competent to
do so than are twelve thick-headed rustics, presided over by a
somnolent and tortuous-minded gentleman in an out-of-date wig. No,
I’m going to follow this up to the bitter end, and when I’ve got there
I’ll take counsel with you as to what we’re going to do about it.”
“I wish to goodness you’d leave it alone, Roger,” said Alec,
almost plaintively.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Mrs. Plant Talks
The inquest, in spite of the snail-like deliberation demanded by all
legal processes, did not occupy more than an hour and a half. The
issue was never in the least doubt, and the proceedings were more
or less perfunctory. Fortunately the coroner was not of a particularly
inquisitive disposition and was quite satisfied with the facts as they
stood; he did not waste very much time, beyond what was absolutely
necessary, in probing into such matters as motive. Only the minimum
possible number of witnesses were called, and though Roger
listened carefully, no new facts of any description came to light.
Mrs. Plant gave her evidence clearly and without a tremor; Lady
Stanworth’s statuesque calm was as unshaken as ever. Jefferson
was in the witness box longer than anyone else, and told his story in
his usual abrupt, straightforward manner.
“You’d never think, to see and hear him, that his whole evidence
is nothing but a pack of lies, would you?” Roger whispered to Alec.
“No, I wouldn’t; and what’s more I don’t,” retorted that gentleman
behind his hand. “It’s my belief that he thinks he’s telling the truth.”
Roger groaned gently.
As far as minor witnesses went, Graves, the butler, and Roger
were both called to corroborate Jefferson’s tale of the breaking down
of the door; and the former was questioned regarding his discovery
of the confession, while Roger told of the locked windows. Alec was
not even called at all.
The verdict, “Suicide during temporary insanity,” was inevitable.
As they left the morning room Roger caught Alec’s arm.
“I’m going to try and get hold of Mrs. Plant now, before lunch,” he
said in a low voice. “Do you want to be present, or not?”
Alec hesitated. “What exactly are you going to do?” he asked.
“Tax her with having been blackmailed by Stanworth, and invite
her to tell me the truth about the night before last.”
“Then I don’t want to be there,” Alec said with decision. “The
whole thing absolutely sickens me.”
Roger nodded approvingly. “I think it’s better that you shouldn’t
be, I’m bound to say. And I can tell you afterwards what happened.”
“When shall I see you, then?”
“After lunch. I’ll have a word with you before I tackle Jefferson.”
He edged away from Alec and intercepted Mrs. Plant, who was
on the point of ascending the staircase. Jefferson and Lady
Stanworth were still talking with the coroner in the morning room.
“Mrs. Plant,” he said quietly, “can you spare me a few minutes? I
want to have a little chat with you.”
Mrs. Plant glanced at him sharply.
“But I’m just going up to finish my packing,” she objected.
“What I have to say is very much more important than packing,”
Roger returned weightily, unconsciously regarding her from beneath
lowered brows.
Mrs. Plant laughed nervously. “Dear me, Mr Sheringham, you
sound very impressive. What is it that you want to speak to me
about?”
“If you will come out into the garden where we shall not be
overheard, I will tell you.”
For a moment she hesitated, with a longing glance up the
staircase as if she wished to escape from something peculiarly
unwelcome. Then with a little shrug of her shoulders she turned into
the hall.
“Oh, very well,” she said, with an assumption of lightness. “If you
really make such a point of it.”
Roger piloted her out through the front door, picking up a couple
of folding garden chairs as he passed through the hall. He led the
way into a deserted corner of the rose garden that could not be
overlooked from the house, and set up his chairs so that they faced
one another.
“Will you sit down, Mrs. Plant?” he said gravely.
If he had been trying to work up an atmosphere with a view to
facilitating further developments, Roger appeared to have
succeeded. Mrs. Plant seated herself without a word and looked at
him apprehensively.
Roger sat down with deliberation and gazed at her for a moment
in silence. Then:
“It has come to my knowledge that you were not speaking the
truth to me yesterday about your visit to the library, Mrs. Plant,” he
said slowly.
Mrs. Plant started. “Really, Mr. Sheringham!” she exclaimed,
flushing with indignation and rising hurriedly to her feet. “I fail to
understand what right you have to insult me in this gross way. This is
the second time you have attempted to question me, and you will
allow me to say that I consider your conduct presumptuous and
impertinent in the highest degree. I should be obliged if you would
kindly refrain from making me the target for your abominable lack of
manners in future.”
Roger gazed up at her unperturbed.
“You were really there,” he continued impressively, “for the
purpose of being blackmailed by Mr. Stanworth.”
Mrs. Plant sat down so suddenly that it seemed as if her knees
had collapsed beneath her. Her hands gripped the sides of her chair
till the knuckles were as white as her face.
“Now look here, Mrs. Plant,” Roger said, leaning forward and
speaking rapidly, “there’s been something very funny going on here,
and I mean to get to the bottom of it. Believe me, I don’t mean you
any harm. I’m absolutely on your side, if things are as I believe them
to be. But I must know the truth. As a matter of fact, I think I know
pretty well everything already; but I want you to confirm it for me with
your own lips. I want you to tell me the plain, unvarnished truth of
what happened in Stanworth’s library the night before last.”
“And if I refuse?” almost whispered Mrs. Plant, through bloodless
lips.
Roger shrugged his shoulders. “You leave me with absolutely no
alternative. I shall have to tell the police what I know and leave the
rest in their hands.”
“The police?”
“Yes. And I assure you I am not bluffing. As I said, I think I know
almost everything already. I know, for instance, that you sat on the
couch and begged Mr. Stanworth to let you off; that you cried, in fact,
when he refused to do so. Then you said you hadn’t any money,
didn’t you? And he offered to take your jewels instead. Then—— Oh,
but you see. I’m not pretending to know what I don’t.”
Roger’s bow, drawn thus at a venture, had found its target. Mrs.
Plant acknowledged the truth of his deductions by crying
incredulously, “But how do you know all this, Mr. Sheringham? How
can you possibly have found it out?”
“We won’t go into that at the moment, if you don’t mind,” Roger
replied complacently. “Let it suffice that I do know. Now I want you to
tell me in your own words the whole truth about that night. Please
leave out nothing at all; you must understand that I can check you if
you do so, and if you deceive me again——!” He paused eloquently.
For a few moments Mrs. Plant sat motionless, gazing into her lap.
Then she raised her head and wiped her eyes.
“Very well,” she said in a low voice. “I will tell you. You understand
that I am placing not only my happiness, but literally my whole future
in your hands by doing so?”
“I do, Mrs. Plant,” Roger said earnestly. “And I assure you I will
not abuse your confidence, although I am forcing it in this way.”
Mrs. Plant’s eyes rested on a bed of roses close at hand. “You
know that Mr. Stanworth was a blackmailer?” she said.
Roger nodded. “On a very large scale, indeed.”
“Is that so? I did not know it; but it does not surprise me in the
least.” Her voice sank. “He found out somehow that before I was
married I—I——”
“There’s not the least need to go into that sort of detail, Mrs.
Plant,” Roger interposed quickly. “All that concerns me is that he was
blackmailing you; I don’t want to know why.”
Mrs. Plant flashed a grateful look at him.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “Well, I will just say that it was in
connection with an incident which happened before I was married. I
have never told my husband about it (it was all past and done with
before I ever met him), because I knew that it would break his heart.
And we are devotedly in love with each other,” she added simply.
“I understand,” Roger murmured sympathetically.

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The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic

Culture 1st ed. Edition Brent Dean

Ireland and the Climate Crisis 1st ed. Edition David

The MGH Textbook of Anesthetic Equipment 1st Edition –

Biological Naturalism and the Mind-Body Problem 1st ed.

Common Wealth Dividends : History and Theory 1st

Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture 1st ed. Edition Neil

Radio Critics and Popular Culture 1st ed. Edition Paul

Robbins & Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease (Robbins

THE MEDICALIZED BODY

ISBN 978-1-349-95355-4 ISBN 978-1-349-95356-1 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934665

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover image: © Nunzio Paci

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company

especially Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

1 The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture 1

2 Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial of Death in

3 Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

4 The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision 65

5 Applications of Terror Management Theory 85

6 Terror Management in Medical Culture 105

7 Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science 127

8 Objectification of the Body as a Terror Management

9 The Objectification of Women and Nature 167

10 The Role of the Medical Cadaver in the Genesis

11 A Theological Context 205

12 The Changing Nature of the Cadaver 223

13 Anesthetic Culture 247

14 Psychiatry’s Collusion with Anesthetic Culture 275

15 Mindfulness—The Way of the Heart 301

Fig. 2.1 Plate XXXI from the manuscript of Guy de Vigevano

The Medicalized Body

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Vodou practice of offering animal sacrifices, a chicken for example, to the

The history of San Francisco offers a poignant illustration of the place

played out in protests of Native Americans in response to the Dakota

The callous treatment of Native American people and disregard for

have cultivated detached concern as an epistemological ideal. To under-

consciousness are particularly informed by an enormous body of evi-

centuries, as anesthetic consciousness has become a habit, modern cul-

Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial

Through a cultural hermeneutic interpretation of the cadaver in the

medical education works implicitly to manage death anxiety through a

Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision

informed by linear perspective vision is found to reflect the medical body

Applications of Terror Management Theory

Terror Management in Medical Culture

be associated with surface learning driven by fear of failure, neuroticism,

Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science

and, consequently, is counterproductive to medical practice in which

Objectification of the Body

Cartesian subject–object metaphysics operative in medical discourse ren-

The Objectification of Women and Nature

The Role of the Medical Cadaver in the Genesis

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a profound cultural shift

against Scholasticism, as described by Michael Allen Gillespie, led to a

The Changing Nature of the Cadaver

Psychiatry’s Collusion with Anesthetic Culture

cultural pattern in which psychiatry tends to collude with anesthetic

Mindfulness—The Way of the Heart

Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision

Applications of Terror Management Theory

Terror Management in Medical Culture

Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science

The Objectification of Women and Nature

The Concretization of Death as a Denial

Cadaver Dissection as Initiation Rite