by Mary Roach
The Babylonians were the original liver guys, believing the organ to be the source of human emotion and spirit. The Mesopotamians played both sides of the argument, assigning emotion to the liver and intellect to the heart. These guys clearly marched to the beat of a freethinking drummer, for they assigned a further portion of the soul (cunning) to the stomach. Similar freethinkers throughout history have included Descartes, who wrote that the soul could be found in the walnut-sized pineal gland, and the Alexandrian anatomist Strato, who decided it lived “behind the eyebrows.”
With the rise of classical Greece, the soul debate evolved into the more familiar heart-versus-brain, the liver having been demoted to an accessory role.* Though Pythagorus and Aristotle viewed the heart as the seat of the soul—the source of “vital force” necessary to live and grow—they believed there to be a secondary, “rational” soul, or mind, located in the brain. Plato agreed that both the heart and the brain were soul terrain, but assigned primacy to the brain. Hippocrates, for his part, seemed confused (or perhaps it’s me). He noted the effects of a crushed brain upon speech and intelligence, yet referred to it as a mucus-secreting gland, and wrote elsewhere that intelligence and “heat,” which he said controlled the soul, were located in the heart.
The early anatomists weren’t able to shed much light on the issue, as the soul wasn’t something you could see or set your scalpel to. Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the first anatomists settled on generative primacy: What shows up first in the embryo must be most important and therefore most likely to hold the soul. The trouble with this particular avenue of learning, known as ensoulment, was that early first-trimester human embryos were difficult to come by. Classical scholars of ensoulment, Aristotle among them, attempted to get around the problem by examining the larger, more easily obtained poultry embryo. To quote Vivian Nutton, author of “The Anatomy of the Soul in Early Renaissance Medicine” in The Human Embryo, “Analogies drawn from the inspection of hen’s eggs foundered on the objection that man was not a chicken.”
According to Nutton, the man who came closest to actually examining a human embryo was an anatomist named Realdo Colombo, who, at the behest of the Renaissance philosopher Girolamo Pontano,* dissected a one-month-old fetus. Colombo returned from his lab—which in all likelihood was not equipped with a microscope, as the device had barely been invented—bearing the fascinating if flat-out wrong news that the liver formed before the heart.
Living amid our culture’s heart-centric rhetoric, the valentines and the pop song lyrics, it is hard to imagine assigning spiritual or emotional sovereignty to the liver. Part of the reason for its exalted status among the early anatomists was that they erroneously believed it to be the origin of all the body’s blood vessels. (William Harvey’s discovery of the circulatory system dealt the liver-as-seat-of-the-soul theory a final fatal blow; Harvey, you will not be surprised to hear, believed that the soul was carried in the blood.) I think it was something else too. The human liver is a boss-looking organ. It’s glossy, aerodynamic, Olympian. It looks like sculpture, not guts. I’ve been marveling at H’s liver, currently being prepped for its upcoming journey. The organs around it are amorphous and unappealing. Stomachs are flappy, indistinct; intestines, chaotic and soupy. Kidneys skulk under bundles of fat. But the liver gleams. It looks engineered and carefully wrought. Its flanks have a subtle curve, like the horizon seen from space. If I were an ancient Babylonian, I guess I might think God splashed down here too.
Dr. Posselt is isolating the vessels and connectors on the liver and kidneys, prepping them for the organs’ removal. The heart will go first—hearts remain viable only four to six hours; kidneys, by contrast, can be held in cold storage eighteen or even twenty-four hours—but the heart recovery surgeon hasn’t arrived. He’s flying in from Utah.
Minutes later a nurse puts her head through the OR doors. “Utah’s in the building.” People who work in ORs talk to each other in the truncated, slang-heavy manner of pilots and flight control types. The schedule on the OR wall lists today’s procedure—the removal of four vital organs in preparation for death-defying transplantation into three desperate human beings—as “Recovery abdm (liv/kid x 2) .” A few minutes ago, someone made reference to “the panky,” meaning “the pancreas.”
“Utah’s changing.”
Utah is a gentle-looking man of perhaps fifty, with graying hair and a thin, tanned face. He has finished changing and a nurse is snapping on his gloves. He looks calm, competent, even a little bored. (This just slays me. The man is about to cut a beating heart out of a human chest.) The heart has been hidden until now behind the pericardium, a thick protective sac which Dr. Posselt now cuts away.
There is her heart. I’ve never seen one beating. I had no idea they moved so much. You put your hand on your heart and you picture something pulsing slightly but basically still, like a hand on a desktop tapping Morse code. This thing is going wild in there. It’s a mixing-machine part, a stoat squirming in its burrow, an alien life form that’s just won a Pontiac on The Price Is Right. If you were looking for the home of the human body’s animating spirit, I could imagine believing it to be here, for the simple reason that it is the human body’s most animated organ.
Utah places clamps on the arteries of H’s heart, stanching the flow of blood in preparation for the cuts. You can tell by the vital signs monitor that something monumental is happening to her body. The ECG has quit drawing barbed wire and begun to look like a toddler’s Etch-a-Sketch scrawls. A quick geyser of blood splashes Utah’s glasses, then subsides. If H weren’t dead, she’d be dying now.
This is the moment, reported the Case Western Reserve group who interviewed transplant professionals, when OR staff have been known to report sensing a “presence” or “spirit” in the room. I try to raise the mental aerial and keep myself open to the vibes. Of course I have no idea how to do this. When I was six, I tried as hard as I could to will my brother’s GI Joe to walk across the room to him. This is how these extrasensory deals go with me: Nothing comes of it, and then I feel stupid for trying.
Here is the deeply unnerving thing: The heart, cut from the chest, keeps beating on its own. Did Poe know this when he wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart”? So animated are these freestanding hearts that surgeons have been known to drop them. “We wash them off and they do just fine,” replied New York heart transplant surgeon Mehmet Oz when I asked him about it. I imagined the heart slipping across the linoleum, the looks exchanged, the rush to retrieve it and clean it off, like a bratwurst that’s rolled off the plate in a restaurant kitchen. I ask about these things, I think, because of a need to make human what otherwise verges on the godlike: taking live organs from bodies and making them live in another body. I also asked whether the surgeons ever set aside the old, damaged hearts of transplant recipients for them to keep. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), only a few express an interest in seeing or keeping their hearts.
Oz told me that a human heart removed from its blood supply can continue beating for as long as a minute or two, until the cells begin to starve from lack of oxygen. It was phenomena like this that threw eighteenth-century medical philosophers into a tizzy: If the soul was in the brain and not the heart, as many believed at that time, how could the heart keep beating outside the body, cut off from the soul?
Robert Whytt was particularly obsessed with the matter. Beginning in 1761, Whytt was the personal physician to His Majesty the King of England, whenever His Majesty traveled north to Scotland, which wasn’t all that often.* When he wasn’t busy with His Majesty’s bladder stones and gout, he could be found in his lab, cutting the hearts out of live frogs and chickens and, in one memorable instance that you hope for Whytt’s sake His Majesty never got wind of, dribbling saliva onto the heart of a decapitated pigeon in an attempt to start it up again. Whytt was one of a handful of inquiring medical minds who attempted to use scientific experimentation to pin down the location and properties of the soul. You could see from his chap
ter on the topic in his 1751 Works that he wasn’t inclined to come down on either side of the heart-versus-brain debate. The heart couldn’t be the seat of the soul, for when Whytt cut the heart out of an eel, the remainder of the creature was able for some time to move about “with great force.”
The brain also seemed an unlikely home port for the animating spirit, for animals had been observed to get on quite well for a surprising length of time without the benefit of a brain. Whytt wrote of the experiment of a man named Redi, who found that “a land tortoise, whose brain he extracted by a hole made in its skull, in the beginning of November, lived on to the middle of May following.”* Whytt himself claimed to have been able. “by the influence of warmth,” to keep the heart of a chick beating in its chest for two hours after its head was “clipped off with a pair of scissors.” And then there was the experiment of a Dr. Kaau. Wrote Whytt: “A young cock whose head Dr. Kaau suddenly cut off…as he was running with great eagerness to his food, went on in a straight line 23 Rhinland feet, and would have gone farther had he not met with an obstacle which stoppt him.” These were trying times for poultry.
Whytt began to suspect that the soul did not have a set resting place in the body, but was instead diffused throughout. So that when you cut off a limb or took out an organ, a portion of the soul came along with it, and would serve to keep it animated for a time. That would explain why the eel’s heart continued beating outside its body. And why, as Whytt wrote, citing a “well-known account,” the “heart of a malefactor, which having been cut out of his body and thrown into the fire, leapt up several times to a considerable height.”
Whytt probably hadn’t heard of chi, but his concept of the ubiquitous soul has much in common with the centuries-old Eastern medical philosophy of circulating life energy. (“Chi” is also spelled “qi.”) Chi is the stuff acupuncturists reroute with needles and unscrupulous healers claim to harness to cure cancer and knock people off their feet in front of TV cameras. Dozens of scientific studies purporting to document the effects of this circulating life energy have been done in Asia, many of them abstracted in the Qigong Research Database, which I browsed several years ago while researching a story on qi. All across China and Japan, qigong (“gong” means cultivation) healers are standing in labs, passing their palms over petri dishes of tumor cells, ulcer-plagued rats (“distance between rat and palm of hand is 40 cm”), and, in one particularly surreal bit of science, a foot-long section of human intestine. Few of these studies were done with controls, not because the researchers were lax, but because that’s not traditionally how Eastern science is done.
The only Western-style peer-reviewed research attempting to prove the existence of life energy was done by an orthopedic surgeon and biomedical electronics expert named Robert Becker, who became interested in chi following Nixon’s visit to China. Nixon, impressed with what he saw during a visit to a traditional Chinese clinic, had urged the National Institutes of Health to fund some studies. One of them was Becker’s. Operating on the hypothesis that chi might be an electrical current separate from the pulses of the body’s nervous system, Becker set about measuring transmission along some of the body’s acupuncture meridians. Indeed, Becker reported, these lines transmitted current more efficiently.
Some years earlier, New Jersey’s own Thomas Edison came up with another variation on the all-through-the-body concept of the soul. Edison believed that living beings were animated and controlled by “life units,” smaller-than-microscopic entities that inhabited each and every cell and, upon death, evacuated the premises, floated around awhile, and eventually reassembled to animate a new personality—possibly another man, possibly an ocelot or a sea cucumber. Like other scientifically trained but mildly loopy* soul speculators, Edison strove to prove his theory through experimentation. In his Diary and Sundry Observations, Edison makes references to a set of plans for a “scientific apparatus” designed to communicate with these soullike agglomerations of life units. “Why should personalities in another existence or sphere waste their time working a little triangular piece of wood over a board with certain lettering on it?” he wrote, referring to the Ouija boards then in fashion among spirit mediums. Edison figured that the life-unit entities would put forth some sort of “etheric energy,” and one need only amplify that energy to facilitate communication.
According to an April 1963 article in a journal called Fate, sent to me by Edison’s tireless biographer Paul Israel, Edison died before his apparatus could be built, but rumors of a set of blueprints persisted for years. One fine day in 1941, the story goes, an inventor for General Electric named J. Gilbert Wright decided to use the closest approximation of Edison’s machine—a séance and a medium—to contact the great inventor and ask him who had the plans. “You might try Ralph Fascht of 165 Pinehurst Avenue, New York, Bill Gunther of Consolidated Edison; his office is in the Empire State Building, or perhaps, best of all, Edith Ellis, 152 W. 58th St.,” came the reply, confirming not only the persistence of personality after death but the persistence of the pocket address book.
Wright tracked down Edith Ellis, who sent him to a Commander Wynne, in Brooklyn, said to have a tracing of the blueprints. The mysterious Commander Wynne not only had the plans but claimed to have assembled and tried out the device. Alas, he could not make it work, and neither could Wright. You, too, can build one and take it for a spin, because the Fate article includes a carefully labeled (“aluminum trumpet,” “wood plug,” “aerial”) drawing of the contraption. Wright and an associate, Harry Gardner, went on to invent their own device, an “ectoplasmic larynx,” consisting of a microphone, a loudspeaker, a “sound box,” and a cooperative medium with great quantities of patience. Wright used the “larynx” to contact Edison, who, apparently having nothing better to do with his afterlife than chat with the nutters, offered helpful tips on how to improve the machine.
While we’re on the topic of supposedly straight-ahead but secretly loopy entities who’ve gotten hung up in the cellular soul area, let me tell you about a project funded and carried out by the U.S. Army. From 1981 to 1984, the U.S. Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) was run by a Major General Albert N. Stubblebine III. At some point during his tenure, Stubblebine commissioned a senior aide to try to replicate an experiment done by Cleve Baxter, inventor of the lie detector, which purported to show that the cells of a human being, removed from that human being’s being, were in some way still connected to, and able to communicate with, the mother ship. In the study, cells were taken from the inside of a volunteer’s cheek, centrifuged, and put in a test tube. A readout from electrodes in the test tube was run through a sensor hooked up to the readout on a lie detector, which measures emotional excitation via heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, etc. (How you measure the vital signs on a slurry of cheek cells is beyond me, but this is the military and they know all manner of top-secret things.) So the volunteer was escorted to a room down the hall from his cheek cells and shown a disturbing videotape of unspecified violent scenes. The cells, it is said, registered a state of extreme agitation while their owner was watching the tape. The experiment was repeated at different distances over the course of two days. Even as far away as fifty miles, the cells felt the man’s pain.
I wanted very badly to see the report of this experiment, so I called INSCOM. I was referred to a gentleman in the history section. First the historian said that INSCOM didn’t keep records back that far. I didn’t need any of the man’s cheek cells to know he was lying. This is the U.S. government. They keep records of everything, in triplicate and from the dawn of time.
The historian explained that what General Stubblebine had been primarily interested in was not whether cells contain some sort of life unit or soul or cellular memory, but the phenomenon of remote viewing, wherein you can sit at your desk and call up images remote from you in time and space, like your missing cufflink or Iraqi ammunition depots or General Manuel Noriega’s secret hideaway. (There was actually an Army Remote Viewing T
eam for a while; the CIA also contracted remote viewers.) When Stubblebine retired from the army he served as chairman of the board at a company called Psi Tech, from which you can hire remote viewers to help you with all your remote-locating needs.
Forgive me. I have wandered far afield from my topic. But wherever it is that I am and however I feel about it, I know that all cheek cells belonging to me within fifty miles of here feel the same way.
The modern medical community is on the whole quite unequivocal about the brain being the seat of the soul, the chief commander of life and death. It is similarly unequivocal about the fact that people like H are, despite the hoochy-koochy going on behind their sternums, dead. We now know that the heart keeps beating on its own not because the soul is in there, but because it contains its own bioelectric power source, independent of the brain. As soon as H’s heart is installed in someone else’s chest and that person’s blood begins to run through it, it will start beating anew—with no signals from the recipient’s brain.
The legal community took a little longer than the physicians to come around to the concept of brain death. It was 1968 when the Journal of the American Medical Association published a paper by the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death advocating that irreversible coma be the new criterion for death, and clearing the ethical footpath for organ transplantation. It wasn’t until 1974 that the law began to catch up. What forced the issue was a bizarre murder trial in Oakland, California.