The Butcher’s Tale

Your child is lying on the operating room table, your beautiful precious child. Brain surgery is needed, you are told, but you are not sure you can trust the surgeon.

She is secretive, it has been said, and she is given money by rich friends, sometimes merely for giving speeches about neuroscience. Yet she has spent decades studying her profession, and she knows that the proper use of a scalpel is both delicate and complex.

She has become adept, through many years of practice, at dealing with lesions, aneurysms, abscesses and hematoma. Whatever you think of her personally, you realize her knowledge of this difficult and subtle craft is both extensive and practical.

But then at the door appears a butcher of some renown. He is finely dressed, for he has done very well indeed in his trade. You are immediately taken by the man’s sheer boldness and confidence. In your moment of grief and indecision, you stare up at him dumbly, awed by his arrogant swagger and air of self-possession.

“I alone can fix it,” he declares, and you let him in the door. As he sweeps confidently past you into the operating theater, you realize that he holds in his hand not a scalpel, but a butcher’s knife.

“Yes, of course,” you say to yourself, “I must have known that. After all, he said he was a butcher.” But by then he is already at the table.

The great man has no use for precision or accuracy, for arcane learning from books, for the mundane niceties of neuroscience. Before you know it, he has already plunged his butcher’s knife deep into your child’s brain, and has begun to slice away the parts he deems useless, or that simply bore him.

You rush to the table, as in a terrible dream, trying vainly to stop the dripping red flow that has already begun to pool onto the floor, and you recall that the man had never claimed to be an actual brain surgeon. He’d merely said that he was a successful butcher.

You realize that this was not his fault, it was yours. As you gaze down at your hands, now covered with the blood of your dying child, you remember that it was you who opened the door, it was you who let the butcher in.