I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
MY MEDICAL OFFICE is a converted tenement flat on a busy Edinburgh street. The consulting room faces east: on summer mornings it’s luminous and warm, and in winter it’s sepia-toned and cool. A steel sink is set into one corner beneath cupboards stocked with sample bottles, needles and syringes, while in the other corner is a refrigerator for vaccines. There’s an old examination couch behind a curtain, and on it, a pillow and a rolled-up sheet. One wall is lined with bookshelves, while others are decorated with da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, noticeboards and certificates from medical specialist colleges. There’s a chart of the city marked with the boundaries of the practice – a diagrammatic urban anatomy of coloured motorways, rivers and B-roads.
I journey through the body as I listen to my patients’ lungs, manipulate their joints, or gaze in through their pupils, aware not just of each individual and his or her anatomy but the bodies of all those I’ve examined in the past. All of us have landscapes that we consider special: places that are charged with meaning, for which we feel affection or reverence. The body has become that sort of landscape for me; every inch of it is familiar and carries powerful memories.
Imagining the body as a landscape, or as a mirror of the world that sustains us, can be difficult in the centre of a city. In terms of geography my practice area is relatively narrow – it’s still possible to visit all of my patients by bicycle – but the cross section of humanity it encompasses is broad. It takes in streets of opulent wealth as well as housing estates of startling poverty, solid professional quarters as well as the student apartments of a university. To be welcomed equally at the crib of a newborn and in a nursing home, at a four-poster deathbed and in a squalid bedsit, is a rare privilege. My profession is like a passport or skeleton key to open doors ordinarily closed; to stand witness to private suffering and, where possible, ease it. Often even that modest goal is unreachable – for the most part it’s not about dramatically saving lives, but quietly, methodically, trying to postpone death.
In the centre of the district, not far from the clinic, is a graveyard that is held apart from the city by a high wall. A gravel path winds between mature stands of birch, oak, sycamore and pine; their roots cradle the coffins as they crumble back to earth. My visits are snatched moments between house calls and clinics, and I usually have the place to myself. Occasionally I meet a parents’ group out taking a break, like me, from the noise of the city streets. We smile and nod acknowledgement as we pass; toddlers that I’ve met in the clinic run laughing between the stones; babies I’ve checked over are lulled gently to sleep in their prams.
The surnames engraved on those stones are familiar: the same ones appear on my computer screen each day. Some of the memorials have an ostentatious gravitas, while others are modest and simple – just a name and two dates. There’s something democratic about the way the rich and poor lie side by side. A row along one wall is reserved for the local Jewish population: it’s cordoned by steel railings, but the tree roots break through regardless. There are memorials to those who’ve died far away in the service of a lost empire, from bullets, childbirth or tropical fevers. Some celebrate venerable lives, while others grieve the calamity of an early death. The occupations of the dead, engraved on the memorials, reveal social shifts over the past century or so: cloth merchants, millers, clergymen, bankers. There’s an obelisk to a master-apothecary, erected when he would have mixed his own tinctures, and the gravestone of a physician who once served those lying around him.
Sparrowhawks nest in the treetops, and hunt the mice and small birds that live among the graves. Ivy runs over the fallen stones, and between the slumped earth of the plots are thickets of sweet brambles. Summer brings a sort of silence, thick and lush, and sometimes I fancy that beyond it I can hear the soft breath of the leaves. By autumn, those leaves cover the graves in crimson and gold, then in winter the stones stand like sentinels between drifts of snow. But in springtime the branches thicken with fresh leaves, and shoots of new grass push into dappling patches of light.
Life is a pure flame, and we live
by an invisible sun within us.