Zugibe then noticed that Barbet had made an anatomical blunder regarding Destot’s space, which is not, as Barbet crowed in his book, “precisely where the shroud shows us the mark of the nail.” The wound on the back of the hand on the Shroud of Turin appears on the thumb side of the wrist, and any anatomy textbook will confirm that Destot’s space is on the pinkie side of the wrist, where Barbet indeed sank his nails into his cadaver wrists.
Zugibe’s theory holds that the nail went in through Jesus’ palm at an angle and came out the back side at the wrist. He has his own brand of cadaveric evidence: photographs taken forty-four years ago of a murder victim that showed up in his lab. “She’d been brutally stabbed over her whole body,” Zugibe recalls. “I found a defense wound where she had raised her hand in an attempt to protect her face from the vicious onslaught.” Though the entry wound was in the palm, the knife had apparently traveled at an angle, coming out the back of the wrist on the thumb side. The pathway of the knife apparently offered little resistance: An X-ray showed no chipped bones.
There is a photograph of Zugibe and one of his volunteers in the aforementioned Sindon article. Zugibe is dressed in a knee-length white lab coat and is shown adjusting one of the vital sign leads affixed to the man’s chest. The cross reaches almost to the ceiling, towering over Zugibe and his bank of medical monitors. The volunteer is naked except for a pair of gym shorts and a hearty mustache. He wears the unconcerned, mildly zoned-out expression of a person waiting at a bus stop. Neither man appears to have been self-conscious about being photographed this way. I think that when you get yourself down deep into a project like this, you lose sight of how odd you must appear to the rest of the world.
No doubt Pierre Barbet saw nothing strange or wrong in using cadavers meant for the teaching of anatomy as subjects in a simulated crucifixion to prove to doubters that the miraculous Shroud of Turin was for real. “It is indeed essential,” he wrote in the introduction to A Doctor at Calvary, “that we, who are doctors, anatomists, and physiologists, that we who know, should proclaim abroad the terrible truth that our poor science should no longer be used merely to alleviate the pains of our brothers, but should fulfill a greater office, that of enlightening them.”
To my mind there is no “greater office” than that of “alleviating the pains of our brothers”—certainly not the office of religious propaganda. Some people, as we’re about to see, manage to alleviate their brothers’ pains and sufferings while utterly dead. If there were ever a cadaver eligible for sainthood, it would not be our Spalding Gray upon the cross, it would be these guys: the brain-dead, beating-heart organ donors that come and go in our hospitals every day.
8. HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DEAD
Beating-Heart Cadavers, Live Burial, and the Scientific Search for the Soul
A patient on the way to surgery travels at twice the speed of a patient on the way to the morgue. Gurneys that ferry the living through hospital corridors move forward in an aura of purpose and push, flanked by caregivers with long strides and set faces, steadying IVs, pumping ambu bags, barreling into double doors. A gurney with a cadaver commands no urgency. It is wheeled by a single person, calmly and with little notice, like a shopping cart.
For this reason, I thought I would be able to tell when the dead woman was wheeled past. I have been standing around at the nurses’ station on one of the surgery floors of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, watching gurneys go by and waiting for Von Peterson, public affairs manager of the California Transplant Donor Network, and a cadaver I will call H. “There’s your patient,” says the charge nurse. A commotion of turquoise legs passes with unexpected forward-leaning urgency.
H is unique in that she is both a dead person and a patient on the way to surgery. She is what’s known as a “beating-heart cadaver,” alive and well everywhere but her brain. Up until artificial respiration was developed, there was no such entity; without a functioning brain, a body will not breathe on its own. But hook it up to a respirator and its heart will beat, and the rest of its organs will, for a matter of days, continue to thrive.
H doesn’t look or smell or feel dead. If you leaned in close over the gurney, you could see her pulse beating in the arteries of her neck. If you touched her arm, you would find it warm and resilient, like your own.
This is perhaps why the nurses and doctors refer to H as a patient, and why she makes her entrance to the OR at the customary presurgery clip.
Since brain death is the legal definition of death in this country, H the person is certifiably dead. But H the organs and tissues is very much alive. These two seemingly contradictory facts afford her an opportunity most corpses do not have: that of extending the lives of two or three dying strangers. Over the next four hours, H will surrender her liver, kidneys, and heart. One at a time, surgeons will come and go, taking an organ and returning in haste to their stricken patients. Until recently, the process was known among transplant professionals as an “organ harvest,” which had a joyous, celebratory ring to it, perhaps a little too joyous, as it has been of late replaced by the more businesslike “organ recovery.”
In H’s case, one surgeon will be traveling from Utah to recover her heart, and another, the one recovering both the liver and the kidneys, will be taking them two floors down. UCSF is a major transplant center, and organs removed here often remain in house. More typically, a transplant patient’s surgeon will travel from UCSF to a small town somewhere to retrieve the organ— often from an accident victim, someone young with strong, healthy organs, whose brain took an unexpected hit. The doctor does this because typically there is no doctor in that small town with experience in organ recovery. Contrary to rumors about surgically trained thugs cutting people open in hotel rooms and stealing their kidneys, organ recovery is tricky work. If you want to be sure it’s done right, you get on a plane and go do it yourself.
Today’s abdominal recovery surgeon is named Andy Posselt. He is holding an electric cauterizing wand, which looks like a cheap bank pen on a cord but functions like a scalpel. The wand both cuts and burns, so that as the incision is made, any vessels that are severed are simultaneously melted shut. The result is that there is a good deal less bleeding and a good deal more smoke and smell. It’s not a bad smell, but simply a seared-meat sort of smell. I want to ask Dr. Posselt whether he likes it, but I can’t bring myself to, so instead I ask whether he thinks it’s bad that I like the smell, which I don’t really, or maybe just a little. He replies that it is neither bad nor good, just morbid.
I have never before seen major surgery, only its scars. From the length of them, I had imagined surgeons doing their business, taking things out and putting them in, through an opening maybe eight or nine inches long, like a woman poking around for her glasses at the bottom of her purse. Dr. Posselt begins just above H’s pubic hair and proceeds a good two feet north, to the base of her neck. He’s unzipping her like a parka.
Her sternum is sawed lengthwise so that her rib cage can be parted, and a large retractor is installed to pull the two sides of the incision apart so that it is now as wide as it is long. To see her this way, held open like a Gladstone bag, forces a view of the human torso for what it basically is: a large, sturdy container for guts.