Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  The patient on the operating table shook his head. Wilhelm untied him and I watched my other self wake up. Having opened blind eyes, he nodded his head idiotically, stroked the edges of the table, and sat up. He seemed extremely awkward. I could not believe that my simulacrum could manifest such animal stupidity.

  The invalid was laid down on the camp-bed. He allowed himself to be stroked. Soon, though, painful surges of nausea caused him to retch, proving the complete absence of any connection between the two of us, since I was not suffering any discomfort, except mentally, due to the effect of a perfectly natural compassion toward a gentleman so very like myself.

  Wait, though! Like me? Was that merely a replica of my body? Or my actual body? Bah! Absurd! I could smell, see, hear—quite badly, admittedly, but nevertheless sufficiently to be convinced that I possessed a nose, eyes and ears. I strained, and cords cut into my limbs; I had flesh, therefore, slack and numb, but flesh…my body was here, not there!

  The professor announced that he was going to untie me.

  The network of hemp loosened. Impatience spurred me. I was standing up in a trice, and a complex impression spread terror through my entire being, upsetting it. God, how heavy and short I was! I tried to look down at myself; there was nothing beneath my head. And as I leaned further forward, with great difficulty, I saw, instead of my feet, two cloven hooves terminating black knobbed legs covered in dense hair.

  A scream swelled my throat…but it was the bellowing of the previous night that burst out of my mouth, making the building shake and echoing repeatedly from unscalable walls of rock.

  “Shut up, Jupiter!” said Lerne. “You’re annoying poor Nicolas, who needs rest!” And he pointed to my body, sitting up in the bed in alarm.

  I was, therefore, the black bull! Lerne, the detestable magician, had changed me into a beast!

  He was greatly amused. The three servile scoundrels were holding their sides, guffawing, and my bovine eyes learned how to weep.

  “Well, yes,” said the enchanter, as if replying to the debacle of my thoughts, “you’re Jupiter. But you have the right to ask more. Here are your identity papers. You were born in Spain, in a celebrated ganaderia, the progeny of famous parents, of which the male posterity died gloriously, with a sword in his withers, on the sand of the arena. I rescued you from the toreadors’ banderillas.30 As your pedigree suited my purposes, I paid dearly for you, and the cows. You cost me 2000 pesetas, not including the cost of transportation. It’s been five years and two months since you were born; you might live as much again, but not more…if we let you die of old age. In sum, I acquired you in order to perform a few experiments on your organism. We’ve only just started.”

  My witty relative was seized by a fit of wild laughter. When he had exhausted his excessive good humor, he went on: “Hey, Nicolas—it’s good, eh? Not too bad, I’m sure. Your curiosity, son of Eve, your infernal curiosity must be sustaining you, and I’ll wager you’re less annoyed than intrigued, eh? Come on, I can be magnanimous, and since you’re now discreet, my dear pupil, hearken to the enlightenment for which you’re so avid. Didn’t I tell you that the time was approaching when you’d know everything? Nicolas, you shall know everything. Anyway, I wouldn’t like to be mistaken for a demon, a thaumaturge or a sorcerer—I’m neither Belphegor, nor Moses, nor Merlin, but simple Lerne. My power doesn’t come from outside; it’s mine, and I’m proud of it. It’s my science. The most one could say by way of correction is that it’s humankind’s science, which I’ve continued in my lifetime and of which I’m the most advanced pioneer, the principal possessor—but let’s not quibble. Are the bandages blocking your ears? Can you hear me?”

  I nodded my head.

  “Good. Listen, then, and don’t roll your eyes; everything will be explained—we’re not in a novel, damn it!”

  The assistants were polishing and rearranging the instruments. My sleeping body was snoring. Having drawn up a stool beside me, Lerne at down, at my level, and made the following speech:

  “First, my dear nephew, I was wrong to call you Jupiter just now. Strictly speaking, I haven’t transformed you into a bull, and you’re still Nicolas Vermont—for a name describes, first and foremost, a personality, which is the soul rather than the body. As, on the one hand, you’ve retained your soul and, on the other, the seat of the soul is the brain, it’s easy to deduce, in the presence of these surgical instruments, that I’ve simply exchanged Jupiter’s brain with yours and that his now inhabits your human rag.

  “That is, you might tell me, Nicolas, a rather dubious joke. You haven’t yet divined either the grandiose objective of my work or the sequence of ideas that led up to it. From that sequence, however, this little comic renewal of Ovid is derived. It may be, though, that that means nothing to you, for I’ve only devoted myself to it occasionally. If you wish, we’ll call it a theatrical skit. No, my goal doesn’t manifest itself to me in this form—comical and malicious, you’ll agree, but puerile and devoid of social or industrial consequences of an exploitable nature.

  “My goal is that of the transposition of human personalities, which I have attempted to obtain, in the first place, by the exchange of brains.

  “You’re familiar with my inveterate passion for flowers. I’ve always cultivated them obsessively. My early life was absorbed by the exercise of my profession, interrupted on Sundays by that recreation: a single day of gardening. Now, my hobby had an influence on my profession, grafting on surgery. At the hospital, I began to devote myself increasingly to animal grafting. I specialized in it, and became passionate about it, reproducing the enthusiasm of the greenhouse in the clinic. Even at the outset, I had dimly anticipated a point of contact between animal and vegetable grafts—a hyphen that my logical endeavor soon clarified…we’ll come back to that.

  “When I became infatuated with animal grafting, that branch of surgery was languishing. We might say that it had remained stationary since the ancient Hindus, the first known grafters. Perhaps you’ve forgotten its fundamental principles though? It doesn’t matter. Learn them again. It’s based, Nicolas, on this fact: that every animal tissue enjoys an individual vitality, and that the body of a living animal merely provides the appropriate environment for the life of these tissues—an environment from which they may be removed, surviving thereafter for a variable length of time.

  “You’re not unaware of the fact that nails and hair continue growing after death. That’s because they’re still alive. A man dead for fifty-four hours, who has left no descendants, still fulfils the principal condition for remedying that omission. Unfortunately, other essential faculties are lacking...but I’ll continue the series of examples.

  “In certain conditions of humidity, oxygenation and warmth, a rat’s tail has been kept alive for seven days, an amputated finger for four hours. After these lapses of time, they die, but during those seven days and four hours, if skillfully reconnected, they would be able to continue living.

  “That’s the procedure employed by the Hindus, who thus reintegrated noses cut off by way of punishment, or, if the appendages had been burned, replaced them with noses made from the skin and flesh of buttocks—previously extracted, my dear Nicolas, from the victim’s own backside.

  “The operation thus effected belongs to the first category of animal grafting, which consists of transplanting a section of an individual to another part of his body. The second consists of uniting two animals by means of two wounds, which weld themselves together. One can then slice from one the part of its body adjacent to the weld, which will continue living on the other thereafter. The third consists of transplanting a part of one animal into another, without an attachment, in such a way that it preserves its own life therein. That’s the most elegant of the three; that’s the one I found seductive.

  “The last-named operation was reputed to be risky for many reasons, of which the principal one is that a graft becomes less likely to take the further removed the two subjects are in the scale of relationship. Gra
fts prosper marvelously on the same animal less well between father to son, and increasingly less well from brother to brother, cousin to cousin, stranger to stranger, German to Spaniard, Negro to white man, man to woman and infant to old person.

  “When I entered the arena, the exchanges in question invariably failed between different species and, for even stronger reasons, between orders and classes. A few experiments, however, were exceptions on which I based my own, wishing to accomplish the most difficult task in order to succeed better in the least, to intergraft a fish and a bird before concentrating solely on humankind.

  “I mentioned a few experiments. Weismann31 had removed a canary-feather from his arm, which he had transplanted a month earlier, and which left a small bloody wound. Boronio32 had grafted the wing of a canary and the tail of a rat on to a cockerel’s crest. That wasn’t much, but Nature itself encouraged me. Birds interbreed shamelessly, and produce numerous hybrids, which gave me evidence of the possible fusion of species. Then again, if one gets further away from humans, vegetables have a considerable plasticity. Such, reduced to its simplest expression, is a summary of the situation that I found and on which I counted.

  “I came here to work more easily, and almost immediately carried out some fine operations. They became famous, none especially. You’ll certainly remember it. Lipton, the tinned goods king, the American billionaire, had only one ear, and wanted a pair. Some poor devil sold him one of his for 5000 dollars. I performed the little ceremony. The ear only died when Lipton did, two years later, of indigestion.

  “It was then, while the world was applauding my triumph—just at the moment when the unexpected arrival of love incited me to make money so that Emma could live in luxury—that I had my great idea, the fruit of the following reasoning. If that billionaire, discontented with his physique, was prepared to pay 5000 dollars for the satisfaction of a slight embellishment, what would he not have given to change it completely and acquire for himself—for his brain—a new body? An abode full of grace, vigor and youth, instead of a sickly and repulsive old cast-off? On the other hand, how many paupers of my acquaintance would surrender their splendid anatomy in exchange for a few years of the good life!

  “And let us note, Nicolas, that the purchase of a juvenile body would not only furnish the pleasures of flexibility, warmth and endurance, but also the enormous advantage that the transferred organ would be regenerated and rejuvenated in a young environment! Oh, I’m not the first to have thought of it, and Paul Bert33 had already admitted the possibility of grafting an organ on to several bodies consecutively, as each of them grew old—with the result that, by virtue of a series of rejuvenations, he anticipated that one might cause a single stomach or a single brain to live indefinitely inside a series of successive bodies. That was to declare that a personality might live indefinitely by means of a series of avatars, a voyage through different carcasses, discarded as appropriate.

  “The discovery to be made surpassed my initial hopes. I was not only in pursuit of the choice of a pleasing appearance; I was after the secret of immortality. The encephalum being the residence of the ego—for you’re aware that the spinal fluid in merely a transmission mechanism and a center of reflexes—it was no longer a question of anything but the ability to graft.

  “To be sure, there’s a considerable difference between an ear and a brain—but they’re only separated by matters of degree: firstly, that between cartilaginous substance and nervous tissue, and secondly that between an accessory article and the principal organ. Logic supported my assurance, and the logic in question was founded on famous antecedents, officially verified.

  “In addition to their grafts of mucous membranes, skin, spurs and so on, Philippeaux and Vulpian replaced the nervous tissue in an optic nerve in 1861. In 1880, Gluck replaced a few centimeters of the sciatic nerve of a chicken with those of a rabbit. In 1890, Thompson removed a few cubic centimeters of brain tissue from various dogs and cats, and introduced into the cavities thus created similar quantities of cerebral substances, collected from dogs, cats and other species. Thus we pass from cartilage to nerve-tissue and from the ear to fragments of brain. Let us now occupy ourselves with difficulties of the second order.

  “Gardeners can easily graft entire organisms. In addition to fingers, tails and paws, Philippeaux and Mantegazza have grafted more important organs: spleens, stomachs, tongues. They made a hen into a cock, on a whim. They even tried to graft a pancreas and a thyroid. In New York in 1905, Carrel and Guthrie proposed that it would be possible to substitute the veins and arteries of animals for those of humans. We have now bridged the difference between the accessory and the principal. Finally, Mantegazza claimed to have grafted the spinal cords and brains of frogs. These observations provided abundant proof that my projects might be realized. Therefore, I would realize them.34

  “I started work.

  “One obstacle stopped me: the employment of a pedicle being impracticable, it transpired that either the body or the brain, or both, once separated, died before being placed in contact with their new companions. Here again, though, the facts emboldened me.

  “As regards the body, an animal can live perfectly well with a single cerebral lobe. You’ve seen a pigeon deprived of three-quarters of its brain flying in circles. A decapitated duck often flies away, for as much as a hundred meters from the chopping-block where its severed head remains. A grasshopper has survived without a head for a fortnight. A fortnight! That’s a verified experiment. As regards the organ, there are the depositions already cited. That led me to think that the brain and the body, suitably treated, would each be able to live independently for the few minutes of separation necessary to the operation.

  “Be that as it may, the slowness of the trepanning led me, in the first instance, to exchange heads rather than brains, knowing, thanks to Brown-Séquard,35 that the head of a dog injected with oxygenated blood had survived severance for a quarter of an hour.

  “Various heteroclitic creatures date from that period—a donkey with a horse’s head, a goat with a deer’s head—which I would have like to conserve, because the animals making them up are rather distant from one another, while belonging to the same families: a distance that I was never able to increase by that procedure. Alas, on the night of your arrival, Wilhelm left the gates open, and those monsters, worthy of Doctor Moreau, took the opportunity to escape, along with many other specimens under observation. You can boast of having arrived in Fonval like a spaniel in a game of croquet…

  “I’ll go on, but to avoid overtaxing the attention of a convalescent, I’ll skip over such details as the abandonment of that first method, the discovery of the Lerne ultra-rapid circular trepanning saw, that of the brain-preserving globes or artificial meninges, that of the nerve-connecting ointment, the recognized utility of the injection of morphine prescribed by Broca36 for constricting the blood-vessels and minimizing blood loss, the accepted use of ether as an anesthetic, the manipulation of encephala for the purpose of fitting them exactly to skulls, etc…

  “Thanks to all that, I transposed the personalities of a—oh, I can never remember the name of it—a…squirrel and a wood-pigeon, then those of a warbler and a viper, and then those of a carp and a blackbird—warm blood and hot blood; that was perfect. In comparison with these prodigies, my goal of human substitution became child’s play.

  “At that point, Karl and Wilhelm offered themselves for the crucial experiment. It was epic. Otto Klotz had… hmm… left me. MacBell wasn’t trustworthy. I operated alone, with the help of Johann and automatic machinery.

  “Success.

  “Oh, those brave men! Who would imagine that their entire bodies had been amputated? And yet each of them, to this day, inhabits his friend’s carnal housing. Look!”

  He summoned his assistants and, lifting up their hair, brought the purple scars to light. The two German were smiling, and I couldn’t help admiring them.

  Lerne went on. “My fortune was made, therefore, and I had ensured,
at a stroke, my glory and Emma’s happiness and love—which is my most inestimable possession, Nicolas!

  “Once the discovery was certain, however, it was necessary to apply it. To tell the truth, one point of obscurity troubled me. I mean the influence of the mental on the physical, and vice versa. After a few months, my patients were modified. If I had endowed a body with a mentality finer than the original, the latter spoiled the former, and I’ve seen, among others, pigs with the brains of dogs become sickly and thin, dying very rapidly. On the other hand, intellects coarser than their predecessors allow themselves to be dominated by the corporeal, and the composite animal then becomes more bestial and fatter. It’s an invariable rule. Sometimes, too, the imperative flesh refashions the mind according to its brutal material instincts—one of my wolves, my dear chap, instilled cruelty in the brain of a sheep! But was that inconvenience not bound, in my future clients—humans—to be reduced to slight differences of health or character? It was derisory, and did not interrupt me at all.

  “Not wanting to leave MacBell with Emma, I sent him to Scotland, and I set out for America, the land of audacities, billons and the grafted ear—which appeared to me to be the best soil to cultivate. That was two years ago.

  “The day after my disembarkation, I had 35 scoundrels at my disposal, resolved to divest themselves of an impeccable constitution to the benefit of 35 generous billionaires I had yet to introduce myself, indoctrinate and convince.

  “Check!

  “I began with the ugliest and those closest to death. Some treated me as a madman and threw me out. Others were annoyed and, while looking me up and down with a majestic and suspicious eye, thrusting out their weak and wheezy chests, or raising themselves up on their rickety legs, expressed astonishment that anyone could think them ugly. The moribund were certain that they would be cured, more certain than they were that they might die under the anesthetic. There were some who took fright, saying that it was tempting God. They recoiled from me as from the Devil, and a few wanted to have me sprinkled with holy water. I raised the objection that a man is modified more completely in the course of his life than he would change beneath my scalpel, and that religious tolerance has come a long way since 1670, when that Russian whose skull had been patched with canine bone was excommunicated37 …but it made no difference.