The Port-Wine Stain Read Online Free

wooden box, my mother’s face hidden by a heavy veil—properties of a melodrama or a gothic tale. A superb needlewoman, she sewed fancy clothes for rich ladies. Franklin, my elder brother, worked as a stevedore on the coal wharves. I was a grocer’s boy. Our means may have been straitened, but, thankfully, we were not destitute. By renting the back room to a German cigar maker, we could keep our little house on Oak Street.
    At seventeen, I was hired as a porter at the medical college. The following year, I was made custodian of Dr. Mütter’s medical curiosities. I’d been to school and could read; I was likable, willing, and, fortunately, a not overly sensitive young man. There was little in that hospital that could turn my stomach. Dr. Mütter collected oddities and freaks of nature: dried tissue, skeletal remains where the initiated could “read the bones” for illness and trauma, waxed models of hideous deformities, body parts, cysts, tumors, kidney and gallstones, brains, embryos—allput up in jars, in alcohol, as if they were your mother’s brandied peach preserves. I was so often among those ghastly remnants of suffering that, during the last war when I sawed off a man’s leg for the first time or sewed up a shrapnel-riddled bowel, my iron constitution was proof against squeamishness.
    â€œYou have an admirable tolerance for the products of misery,” Dr. Mütter once said to me. He had passed a reeking dish of some yellowish matter under my nose and had insisted that I smell it. I snuffled and, despite its noxiousness, did not reveal to him my disgust. He would often test my resolve in this highly empirical manner. “The pathologist can sometimes diagnose a disease by its stench,” he said. “The Chinese physician will adjust the body’s humors according to the odor of the stool. We can learn much from Oriental medicine.”
    I admit to a fascination verging on the morbid for Mütter’s pickled monstrosities, which P. T. Barnum would have coveted for his American Museum. I’ve often wondered what it might signify about me as a man, apart from the physician I am, to have been drawn to what the world calls horror. When I dusted the specimen jars, polished the oak cabinets, and rid the glass cases of the fingerprints of the curious, I would thrill at the varieties of abnormality that nature, in her capriciousness, had produced.
    There’s a curiosity, Moran, comprised of pity, of joy in having been spared nature’s enormities, and of a perverse thrill of disgust, that causes us to gaze in fascination at the ugly. The beautiful can preen themselves in it, while we others can smile at ideal Beauty’s overthrow. I’ve alwaysthought it strange that Edgar Poe, who valued beauty and good taste above all other aesthetic qualities, should have found the horrific attractive. He was like a physician charting the course of a grave illness. He was obsessed by the pathology of the human soul, which he could not cure. But his record of its disease is a masterpiece of elegance, reason, and intuition worthy of his own detective, M. Dupin.
    â€œRead this book, Edward,” said Mütter, handing me a much-used copy of Elements of Pathological Anatomy , which had been published a few years before. It was written by Samuel Gross.
    Yes, Moran, the same Dr. Gross painted by Thomas Eakins in ’75. He replaced Mütter when he resigned because of ill health. My years have taught me not to be surprised by the apparently happenstance needlework that stitches the fabric of the universe together. In time, its pattern will become evident. Edgar wrote, “And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found, in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of analogies.”
    Dr. Mütter was pleased with the interest I showed in his collection and, later, put me to work in the surgery, where I would clean up after an operation and carry pails