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Abstract

“You must never again set your anger upon a patient. You were tired, you said, and therefore it happened.“’ Thus begins “Brute,” by Richard Selzer, a writer who recently retired from surgery to pursue writing full time. “Brute” is a confessional gem of a piece, barely four pages long. Yet it tells the tale of a doctor who lost control. Even while realizing it, he maliciously took advantage of a patient he was ostensibly helping. As with all of Selzer’s stories, it’s even more complicated than that. It’s 25 years ago. The doctor has been summoned to the emergency room at 2 AM to sew up a “hugely drunk” hulk of a man with a laceration in his forehead, “deep to the bone.” The man struggles like Samson to get free and will not cooperate. Restraints are applied. As the doctor begins to clean the wound, the man struggles even more. “Lie still,” Dr Selzer petulantly tells him, enraging him further. The man curses at him, angering the doctor. “Suddenly, I am in the fury with him. Somehow he has managed to capture me, to pull me inside his cage. Now we are two brutes hissing and batting at each other. But I do not fight fairly.” Doctor Selzer proceeds to sew the huge man’s ear lobes to the mattress with heavy silk (one imagines it to be 2-O), wipes the clots from his eyes so the man can see, taunts him with the same curse the man just hurled at him, and grins “the cruelest grin of my life. Torturers must grin like that, beheaders and operators of racks.” He finishes the job while the man, sensing defeat, holds still. “How sorry I will always be,” Selzer writes 25 years later “not being able to make it up to him for that grin.” There are many issues here: The rnost immediate is the “need” to use of force as opposed to other options (not discussed or tried in the story), for example, a sedative or waiting for sobriety or recruiting another health care worker with more rapport. Or Selzer could have elected not to sew the patient up at all. On a somewhat deeper and more interesting (intellectually, that is) level is the realization at the time that he was doing something wrong and enjoying it but not stopping. There is also