THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES

by Katherine MacLean

May 10, 1953; 2:30 A.M.

DEAR JACK:

Some acts seem to change the meaning of the universe. Yesterday I killed.

It’s a poor way to begin a letter, I admit. I’m writing this down because I have to tell someone, now; because I can’t keep it to myself, and no one else is awake. Looking out the window, I can see the empty streets of our little suburb lying silvered in the moonlight. I can’t wake anyone at this hour to talk to him, though I desperately want to hear a human voice. This letter is the next best thing.

You don’t know much about my work, Jack, only that I am a neurosurgeon. We play cards together, and argue politics, and you and your wife invite me to theater parties and try to marry me off to pretty girls—but I don’t think I’ve ever told you exactly what I do.

I operate on brains.

I take out parts of people’s brains; that is my profession.

I am well known in my field, for I do what other neurosurgeons cannot do. At first it was just small tumors that I took out, and then I progressed to removing smaller and smaller tumors that others could not find, and injured tissue that others could not locate, the tiny scars of old concussions and birth injuries that send electric pulsations out of phase with the waves of the rest of the brain, and so cause seizures—what is called epilepsy.

I open up their skulls—it’s all very mechanical, Jack, mere carpentry. The patient is conscious, but reassured and calm, knowing that he won’t feel anything. His head is shaved and screened off with towels so he can’t see what I am doing. I cut the scalp in three sides of a wide square and fold the skin back from the bone. Then I take a wide drill and drill four holes through the thick skull bone, one at each corner of the square, then take a hand drill with a small rotary saw blade and run the buzzing blade slowly from one hole to another. It is a trap door of bone now. An assistant pries it up, turns it back. (There is almost no blood and, afterwards, only a few thin scars to show for it.)

I can see the brain now through a thin tough lining of dura. I cut the dura with scissors and fold it back like a page of a book. And there it is, the living brain, grey and quivering slightly with the throbbing of the few blood vessels branching on its surface.

I have to locate the spot that is causing the trouble, and rapidly now. It is difficult to see anything in the curves and folds of soft grey. An assistant hands me an electrode that gives tiny currents of electricity, a current so small that if it touches the scar I am searching for it will not set off a seizure, but the patient will recognize the sensation of one coming, the odd emotion, the dizziness and distance and “aura” that warns a second before an attack and say, “There it is.” I touch the pencil electrode here and there over the grey sum face, the tiny current here bringing alive an old memory in the patient’s mind, here making one of his fingers twitch, here bringing a sensation of watching something green spinning before his eyes.

“There it is. That felt like it. Getting warmer, Doc,” he says, and I bend closer, touching the electrode in narrowing circles, and then I see it, a tiny section of grey that is different and rougher, a twisting of tiny blood vessels in it that makes a pinkness and wrong color.

I take the scar out gently, using a little sucking tube that wiffles air into itself with a sighing noise and pulls the soft detachable grey layer up into itself, leaving a small section of unthinking, unelectrical, passive white shining through from inside…

The operation is expensive, tremendously so. The hospital will pay only part. The patient and his family are poor—they always are; it is difficult for a man who has spasms to hold a job, and then there’s the cost of the accidents and hurts that come from the inevitable falling when the seizures strike.

So I often stand with the insufflater hissing in my hand for one minute more, trying to think of something else I can do, some other way—but time is precious. I bend forward again and begin. The grey delicate layers of thought and of perceptive feeling, the layers that mean sensitivity with the hands and skill with the fingers go easily up into the little tube like soft, damp fluff and leave a widening circle of white.

It is the left hemisphere I make useless, the left hemisphere that controls feeling and thinking and skills in right-handed people. This patient was right-handed and left-brained; now he will have to be left-handed, and learn now to think and feel and regain his old skills as best he can with the right half-brain that remains. He is middle-aged; it will be hard to change and begin again. But it is better perhaps than falling down in fits and cracking his head against the pavement until he has no brain at all.

I have a reputation. They say that I know more about the human brain than any man who has ever lived. They have heard of my skill in London and Prague and Paris and Moscow and New York, and surgeons come from all these places to watch me operate.

From these operations, from looking at the human brain, that marvelous instrument exposed before me almost daily, from touching it gently with electricity and hearing the patients report what odd sensations, what odd thoughts and memories come, I have learned much…

I do other kinds of operations, too. At first I operated only on epileptics. But it is not just scars that are damaging to the brain. Sometimes thoughts and memories make their own kind of scars, and do their own kind of damage. Having an occasional fit and falling down before an auto is not the worst thing that can happen to a man. He could live in an asylum and scream, “open open open,” or “hat hat hat,” day and night, alone in a cell, helpless in some inside agony no one can reach or soothe.

Experimenting despairingly, neurologists found that the severing frontal sections of the brain—it is known as lobotomy—would cure those scars too. But they cut blindly. Often the operation stopped the screaming and brought peace, but usually a dull animal peace, and sometimes the peace of death.

Because of my knowledge and experience, I was asked to help the best and most precious spirits: the great conductor who had broken down; the author who could only write down the words that strange voices shouted in his mind; the over-worked statesman who could now listen only to imagined whisperings against himself; all the others with great responsibilities who had been broken by trying too hard to fulfill them.

So I began doing this other kind of operation. Because I knew the brain, could study their encephalograph brain-electricity charts and trace the convolutions carefully like a familiar map, I could take out merely that narrow small section that was giving them hurt, and destroy nothing else.

People came from my operations cured and happy, without that numb animal look that sometimes follows lobotomy. They came out adjusted to life for the first time, not wanting and not missing the things that I bad cut away. They were grateful.

But as I operated, I was trying not to think.

For you see, Jack, I knew what I was doing to each brain. I knew what those delicate grey tissue cells were that I removed with the hissing insufflater tube. I knew what part of the human mind and soul I was taking. Sensitivity to the hurts and loves of others … dreams and longings and plans for the future … the deeper reactions to music and poetry … the sensitive adjustment of values and motives to new situations … emotional insight … creative logic …

Always it was those sections which were scarred by experience, sending distortion and agony through the mind.

While I work steadily, efficiently, seemingly calm, the thoughts come, and I cannot stop them.

What kind of life is it that I am adjusting this man to, that he will be most sane and adjusted when the best parts of his mind are taken out?

Society is very old, and custom very ancient, and most of our ways were handed to us from far back in the darkness of time. Can some of it be traced back to herds and packs that were not human? Were not the first men born misfit into a society of apes? If children were born into an asylum and raised only by the inmates, would not they become sincerely “mad” in such surroundings, and think at last that everything around them was natural and right? The texture of tradition is learned in early childhood; it grafts itself onto the mind and seems like instinct, too natural to be consciously noted.

I think of George, the archetype of all the children of fact and legend who have been adopted by the animals. He was raised by wolves; they suckled him and were friendly and tolerant, like dogs, and they fed him through the long period of his babyhood.

The first thing for him to learn was to survive. After that, his developing human mind should have been free to continue learning and discovering until he demonstrated his innate human superiority. That is what you would expect.

But first he had to learn to be strong and cunning as a successful wolf. So all the tremendous skill and capacity for creative learning of the human-child mind was poured into learning the tricks and skills of the wolf way of life.

But he was not a wolf. What was natural to them had to be learned painfully by him: to run on four feet instead of on his long hind legs; to sniff with his nose instead of using his eyes; to repress the natural babbling and baby muttering that was so dangerous in this life; to repress the curiosity of a developing mind that wanted to stop and pick things up with his odd un-wolflike front paws—and thus risk being left behind by the pack and, with his poor, inadequate sense of smell, become lost. He was a misfit and a cripple by the standards of the wild dogs of the woods. They must have been very patient, indeed.

George managed at last to become a self-supporting wolf. But by that time he was an inferiority-complex, not-very-bright wolf, neurotic and trembling and unable to reason or to adjust his behavior (that is the way with extreme neurosis), a wolf who snapped and snarled at the humans who captured him, who howled lonesomely to be let free to return to the cold woods, and who at last died—very much as an animal in a zoo may die of inability to adjust to life in captivity.

If I had been there then, with the techniques I know now, I could have adjusted George. I could have operated and removed the source of his neurosis, and made him a contented, well-adjusted wolf. But a wolf, not a man. For it was the human parts of his mind that were misfit, scarred and inhibited and rendered useless by repression, left only as sources of pain and insanity.

And so I think again, as I operate on the man now under my knife: what kind of world is it that I am adjusting him to, that he will be most sane and adjusted when the best parts of his mind are taken out?

Were not the first men born misfit, like George, into a society of apes? They might have wanted nothing more than to be happy, well-adjusted apes. But evolution is ruthless and indifferent to individual cost, and it can’t be stopped. The original breed of mankind must have multiplied and spread across the Earth because they learned to get by in the world of apes, making a copy, that—physically weak, neurotic, and mentally crippled as it was—was more efficient than the original. Perhaps if George had been born with more intelligence or even genius, he would have been able to make himself into a leader of wolves, ready to breed a race of wolf-imitations. But then he would have been even more of a misfit—he would have become mad, a lunatic wolf. I think of the chanting, the ritual, the blood sacrifice of primitive man. Mad … a lunatic wolf or a lunatic superape, twisted carbon copies, both of them.

And the twistedness perpetuating itself. The young are born without warp, but what happens when they are born into an asylum and taught to behave like the adults there? Neurotic behavior is intolerant of any other way of behaving than its own. What starts as forced mimicry could soon become completely natural to the learning child. Neurotic behavior is rigid, conservative, obsessive and inflexible. Six million years we have had already, gradually working toward sanity, but God, how slowly and with such relapses! And, in all that time, all that our cortex, our new brilliance, has given us is animal conquest of the other animals, and for the rest—neurosis, frustration, and an inhibition that can make the best portions of our minds give us only pain and distortion.

And all I can do to help is to remove parts of the brain.

One in seven of us will break down and be hospitalized at some point of our lives, and perhaps all of us who walk the streets of the world would be happier without the subtle grey cells I take from brains, the layer of brilliance that is given the unbearable cross of concealing itself so that we may learn, painfully, to be good imitation apes, instead of men. We don’t know what it is to be human; we have never been allowed.

This is a long letter, but I will get to the point now.

Yesterday I performed an operation that I had been begged to do. It was the parents who came and begged me, for the sake of their twelve-year-old boy. He was feeble-minded. They had been told that he should go to a training home with others like him, yet they fought against fate, they wanted to believe that he could grow to run and laugh and be bright like any other normal boy. They claimed that he had been a brilliant baby—perhaps he had sustained a head injury or had a brain tumor, and I must cure him.

I was dubious. All parents seem to think -their first baby is brilliant. No operation can cure a child who is naturally feeble-minded.

They grew desperate and told me stories of remarkable things the child had done before it was two years old, but the stories were of things that only the boy’s nurse had seen, probably made up by the nurse to please them. I did not believe the stories, but the parents were sensitive and obviously thoughtful, so I told them that if the boy had shown such an obvious change he might have sustained a head injury.

They begged me, and they were wealthy, and sincerely, pitifully eager for their son. So for their sake, and for the fees they could offer that would help poorer cases, I did it.

The encephalographs had been abnormal. I was expecting perhaps to find a tumor.

When the cap of bone was off and the rough outline of the boy’s brain showed under the thin dura, it looked wrong. I was afraid.

For a half a moment I stood, while a professional entertainer continued to hold the boy’s sleepy attention by making shadow pictures with his hands. I stood there, and without any move that might betray my reaction to the assisting doctors, I reproached myself bitterly for spoiling the pleasure of perfect health the boy at least had had by giving him metal plates in his head where the safe, solid bone should be. Even if I closed it up immediately without going further… . The outline of the surface of his brain looked wrong, different, unworkable. The boy was naturally feeble-minded, I thought, and was glad that the movie cameras were not watching this operation, glad that I had decided not to use this operation on a “healthy, contented child” as an example for others of what to do. Now there would be no record of a mistake.

He had been happy the way he was. I reached for an instrument to begin closing the opening, admitting the mistake.

But then the shape of the boy’s brain began to look clearer to me under the obscuring layer, the differences having a form of their own, assuming a shape I could not quite believe.

I turned from the instrument I had been reaching for, took one that would cut the dura, cut it and turned it back.

He had not been happy!

God knows what thoughts were passing through that living, functioning brain as I looked down at it. Thoughts far past any following of mine. Perhaps his thinking had withdrawn from reality in order that reality could have no influence on the body it inhabited; or perhaps he was conscious and pretending, behaving like a two-year-old infant because it was too incredibly difficult to behave just like a twelve-year-old boy. He probably understood where he was and what was happening and apparently did not care.

From the central cleft, like wings just beginning to grow, an extra pair of lobes folded back and down over the surface—lobes like nothing I had ever seen before! They were alive and operating—I had seen their electrical pattern recorded by the electroencephalograph, had noticed the odd pattern without understanding it. The lobes were thinking. The brain was the brain of a different species, one beyond genius!

I had to decide what to do.

The tray of instruments was waiting, and on it lay the wire-edged cauterizing knives that were used to take out a tumor.

I had not hesitated long enough for the observers and students around me to wonder why I had stopped. I don’t think any of them remember clearly what they saw or understand it.

I am a surgeon; my habit and training is to remove that which is causing the trouble. I must have moved rapidly (the observers complimented me afterward on the unusual speed and sureness of the operation), but to me those moments lasted forever. I can remember the horror, and the thought as I touched it—It knows what I am doing!

Dawn is beginning to grey the sky, and a bird has let out a few sleepy twitters and dozed off again. Animals are so happy, jack, so well-adjusted to their environment.

The boy is normal now, the way his parents wanted him to be. He is an average twelve-year-old boy, not much better nor much worse than the other boys he’ll go to school with, talk with, play baseball with. He’ll be all right now, but I can still see the blood and the cut nerves and the strange lobes. And I wish I could sleep.

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