Great Britain’s finest professors of medicine and their students scuffled about the tiered, rounded church attic pews of Old St. Thomas’ Hospital like penned swine in frock coats. The room was skylit, wood-paneled, and suffered from the fetid smell. Six tiers were brimming with an assembly of men, shoulder to shoulder, hands folded on their laps, stiffly seated in such an outward-facing manner that they could have smiled for a class photograph.

The Surgeon General strode into the pit in his squelching Wellington boots and a waistcoat. He was a Welsh boy brought up in a chocolate-box thatched cottage in Merthyr Mawr. He would fish for brown trout down by the River Ogmore, flatten orchid petals between the pages of his encyclopedia on common diseases, and plait his grandmother’s fine hair when arthritis immobilized her hands. None of this boyish gentility would be assumed of him now, at least not since Balaklava when he assisted in the amputation of an English soldier’s leg on his first day stationed in the Crimean War. He had been shipped across the Black Sea for fifteen months during which he consumed too many potatoes and learned about the nature of his calling. The Surgeon General had since become a venerable boy with a handlebar mustache, frown lines, and a rainbow of dishonorable ribbons decorating his uniform. His brothers were dying. Skin disease was the post-war enemy. Erysipelas, gangrene, smallpox, and frostbite, among others. Him and Wright were the last medics left from their field hospital.

The Surgeon General held out his arms while Cornelius, a newly hired apprentice wearing pince-nez and no expression on his face, redressed him, trading his waistcoat for a starchy, blood-stained apron. Private William Wright shot himself this morning, the apprentice informed with the aloofness of an incoming telegraph. He had been diagnosed with scabies. The Surgeon General allotted himself forty-six seconds to mourn, casting his face away from the audience, occupying his hands with straightening the equipment on his procedure tray, and tightening jars half-filled with formalin. A teardrop fell on one of the lids.  

The patient was escorted in by Fletcher and Felix, identical twin surgical assistants, and strapped down with leather bands to the narrow wooden operating table staged centermost in the pit, which evoked in the perverted minds of some onlooking students a bawdy medieval torture table. The patient was a bereaved woman and a charity case from the general hospital. She had a short, layered haircut that would have prepared her neck for the guillotine, had she been a French treasonist. Most patients admitted to the operating theatre were notoriously rabid, thrashing around like beached salmons, reduced to their most brutish forms—nude and begging. A decent cityman became a supplicating nutcase when condemned to the operating table. They bartered away their estates, their wives, their livestock, their books. Their struggle to escape was the comedic opening act for the surgery to proceed. The current patient was one of the rare doves, quiet and conscious. She arched her back to better see the gallery and judged the upside down attic and men with a shrewd stare that resembled the Surgeon General’s late mother whenever the arrangement of furniture in his home was not up to par. 

The Surgeon General lifted his scalpel, demonstrating the surgical instrument to the gallery. The blade caught the sunlight, and the patient’s cervine eyes fell upon its silvery winking and flickering. When the Surgeon General and his three apprentices’ concentrated faces closed in above her, blotting out the sunlight, she saw them as an infant might look up past the bars of her cradle and see her family, or a corpse might look up past the dirt walls of his grave and see her murderers. Her calm splintered. She wept. The Surgeon General carved a circle into her stomach like a pumpkin top, reopening her caesarean section scar. Weeps devolved into guttural, birdish sounds. Contortions of the neck and the knees. The audience craned over the handrails. Some whistled and hollered. 

  The Surgeon General commenced his cadaveric dissection. He pulled out the coiled small intestine like silk scarves from a clownish mouth, and meter by meter they came unwound, until a heap hung in his hands, long enough to jump rope with. The large intestine followed, then the liver. He identified each organ and its anatomical purpose. The men of medicine slumped in their pews, disinterested, because the pallid patient was limp and mumbling, her mouth dumbly open.

As when the speared bull topples in the arena dust and the spectators lose their object of fascination, so did the procedure become long and uninspiring.

The Surgeon General gutted the patient, educated the men on the female anatomy, jarred her insides, gallbladder, kidney, diaphragm, so on and so forth, until he found what appeared to be a penny in her stomach. He extracted it with forceps and washed it in the tableside water basin. Once rinsed, the Surgeon General observed that the curious black object lacked the flatness of a coin. It was round and firm like a cranberry when he gave it a squeeze. How idiopathic. He inspected and prodded her stomach lining. The object was found outside of her gastrointestinal tract. The patient did not swallow it. Perhaps it was an undocumented vestigial organ? What an astonishing medical discovery! His sole medical discovery on female anatomy. A stomach seed. The Surgeon General was convinced it was a seed, something indigestible. He stood unmoving for several moments, drafting and defending his research in his head, until a weak pulse from the woman’s arteries jolted his hands.

The men of medicine roused when the Surgeon General presented the unfamiliar seed between his thumb and forefinger. It did not catch the light. The dark curiosity he held was dull, absorbing the sunlight, defying all laws of electro-optics. The seed was a perfect blackbody. No such thing existed naturally on Earth. 

Cardiologist Henry Pemberton of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, rumored to be embezzling charitable funds, suggested the seed could be the patient’s womb. The Surgeon General beckoned Felix for a loupe, but Fletcher fetched it instead. If this is her womb, the Surgeon General responded, holding the glass up to his eye, then is it possible to surgically remove the hysteria from a woman? Commentary ensued. Ophthalmologist Caesar Beaumont of Bethlem Royal Hospital, whose patients were all in the loony bin, proposed the seed as her placenta. Pulmonologist Rupert Croft of Jervis Street Hospital, who worked as a night soil man during his residency, hypothesized a peach pit. An acorn. Something fossilized. Molten. A miscarriage. Cornelius blanched and draped a towel over the disemboweled patient. Send for an illustrator, a daguerreotype, straight away! The press, and the King’s Courier. The Surgeon General felt like a dollmaker who had repurposed all of womankind.

Great Britain’s finest professors of medicine and Lola Horowitz made a discovery.