[Getorius and Arcadia 01] - The Secundus Papyrus

by Albert Noyer

  “As you wish.” Getorius guessed that the temptation of an immediate pitcher of wine was greater than that of a warm place to sleep. “You can go out that door, it leads to the Via Honorius. No one will see you.”

  After Brevius was gone, Getorius straightened out Marios’ body on the table, then took a pair of shears from the instrument cabinet. He was cutting away the dead man’s fur vest when he heard movement and looked up. Arcadia stood in the doorway in her night tunic, barefoot, with only a shawl thrown around her shoulders.

  “You’re going to dissect him, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “You’ll be cold, dressed like that,” Getorius replied, evading her question and putting down the shears. “Let’s go back to bed. We’ll have patients in the morning.”

  Getorius had trouble falling asleep again. His mind was filled with conflict over the prospect of cutting into a human body. Even Aristotle thought that dissecting a cadaver was useless research, since the body’s functions ceased after death. Nicias was the only surgeon he knew who had actually examined a person’s inner organs. The city of Alexandria, where Nicias had studied, had allowed the practice then, but Christian fanatics had since taken over the city’s administration and forbidden dissection under threat of closing the medical school.

  Dissection was not a subject preached about by the bishop at Mass, but Getorius knew that the Church’s opposition had to do with the expectation of a physical resurrection for the dead. According to the Apostle Paul, the event was long overdue. He had implied that it would take place during his lifetime, warning men who were married to act as if they were celibate. Mourners were to live as if there were nothing to grieve for. The joyful, he had written, need not rejoice in their good fortune, and buyers should be aware that they might not have an opportunity to use their purchases, nor the wealthy to spend their fortunes.

  Getorius got up and poured himself a cup of watered wine. There were some who had not believed Paul. Skeptical Greek proselytes, who were still surrounded by sculptures of the ideal human form, scoffed, or questioned the nature of the resurrected dead. How were they to be raised? In what kind of body? Paul had struggled to explain his vision. The perishable clay of Adam’s body would be raised to an imperishable one, the Apostle had reasoned. What had been seeded in humiliation would be harvested in glory. What had been conceived in a human body would be raised as a spiritual entity.

  Church scholars assumed Paul meant that all body parts should be intact, without exactly explaining what would happen to those who had lost limbs battling pagans or heretics in the name of Christianity. Willful mutilation was out of the question. Christ’s reference to those who castrated themselves for the sake of the Kingdom was interpreted metaphorically as a rejection of sexual relations—except by a few grim-faced fanatics.

  Getorius had gone back to bed but was still awake when he heard the first rooster crowing, well before dawn. He rose quietly, trying not to disturb Arcadia, but she heard him dressing in the semi-darkness of the bedroom.

  She sat up. “If you’re determined to dissect that corpse then I’m going to help you.”

  “No. Besides, aren’t you annoyed with me?”

  “I was, but this is more important to you…to our work…than an argument over those manuscripts.”

  “Cara,” he objected, “this is not work for a woman.”

  “Am I a woman, or a medica-in-training?”

  “I’ll not have you as an accomplice in this—”

  “If you keep arguing with me this loudly,” Arcadia hissed, “you’ll awaken the servants and everyone will be an accomplice.”

  “It will be cold as the Boreal wind in the clinic,” Getorius warned, still trying to dissuade his wife.

  “I’ll wear my fur jacket.” Arcadia slid out of bed and helped him lace up his leather vest. “Meet you in the clinic after I’ve dressed.”

  Getorius had finished cutting away the dead man’s jacket and tunic, and was positioning two oil lamps near his head when Arcadia entered.

  “Where will you start?” she asked, then puckered her nose. “Agh! Those clothes will have to be burned!”

  “I’m going to check the cause of the phlegm imbalance that killed Marios.”

  “His name was Marios?”

  “Yes. I’ll drill into his skull, but it won’t be pretty. Phlegm will pour out like…like dregs from a wine barrel.” As Getorius ran a spatula through the dead man’s tangled hair he noticed crab-like insects moving on the scalp. “Lice. Dust his head with arsenicum. Armpits and pubic areas, too, we don’t want vermin on us.”

  As Arcadia treated the affected regions, she noted, “He was also hosting colonies of scabies mites.”

  “Poor fellow didn’t have the few coppers needed to get into the public baths. Bring me the auger while I shave a section of scalp.”

  Getorius knew Galen had taught that the brain was a large gland whose function was to produce phlegm. He would drill an opening in the skull and allow excess mucus to drain out. Then he could remove a section of bone and try to locate an abnormality in the organ that might account for the imbalance. He had done such a procedure on a cat, but the animal had been healthy and nothing leaked out. It would be different with Marios.

  Arcadia came back with the boring tool. While waiting for Getorius to finish shaving a patch of Marios’s hair, she noticed a crust of dried mucus that had run from the man’s nose, but it was no more than when he had been alive.

  “Getorius, this is puzzling. Herodotus wrote that the brain has an outlet through the nostrils. Embalmers used the opening to remove the organ when preparing a body for mummification.”

  “I know what Herodotus wrote. Bring a bowl over here, I’m ready.”

  Arcadia brought the clay vessel and held it under the shaved area. Getorius centered the auger on the white skin, then paused. “What was your point about Herodotus?” he asked in a more gentle tone.

  “If the brain produces phlegm, as Galen believed, wouldn’t the excess have leaked out overnight through this man’s nose?”

  Getorius shrugged a gesture of ignorance in reply, and began a slow turning of the bronze drill. The sound of metal crunching through bone made Arcadia flinch, but she forced herself to watch. In moments her hands began to tremble.

  “Hold that bowl in place, woman,” Getorius snapped. “I can’t do both.”

  She steadied the vessel. Getorius’ breath steamed in the cold air of the room as he strained against the bone’s resistance. When the auger bored through with a sudden thrust, he pulled back quickly, expecting a gush of mucus through the opening. Only a trickle of clear fluid dripped into the bowl.

  “That’s strange,” he said, confused. “The man was snorting like a leviathan earlier, yet nothing came out.”

  “Could it have drained into his chest? You know how people spit up phlegm when they have an imbalance.”

  “Perhaps. I want to look at his lungs anyway.” Getorius felt at the sternum and rib cage. “Undernourished. Sad, but it will make my work easier. Get me that monkey skeleton. The bone connections should be similar.”

  He expected to find a quantity of blood in the two spongy masses. Galen’s observations with apes concluded that the blood pumped into lungs evaporated and was breathed out as a gas. Getorius had found no proof of this in his own animal dissections, yet conceded that humans might be different. Marios had in fact been spitting blood, an imbalance that could give credibility to Galen’s theory.

  Glancing at the room’s high windows, Getorius saw a faint tint of blue coloring the panes. Dawn would come quickly, and with it the first patients. He could smell bread from the baker’s shop on the corner, and hear Agrica clanking pans together to show that she was preparing breakfast for the household.

  “Bolt the door,” he ordered Arcadia, after she came in with the skeleton. “We don’t need the cook coming in here to ask how we want our pan of eggs.”

  Taking up a piece of charred wood from the grate, Getorius eyed the m
onkey thorax bones. While Arcadia held a lamp, he traced a rectangle on the left side of Marios’s chest, estimating the man to have been about thirty years old. His musculature and various scars on his body suggested that he might have worked as a stevedore at one time, but poor food and excessive drinking had wasted his body to the extent that he had not been able to counterbalance the humor imbalance that had made this his final illness.

  Following the dark line, Getorius made an incision along the ridge of the sternum to open a flap of skin and gain access inside the rib cavity. The skin membrane proved to be tougher than that of an animal, which usually peeled away with its fur.

  “Use that forceps to hold back the bluish membrane,” he told Arcadia, then blurted out, “Look at the size of his rib cage! I can’t cut through it with the instruments I have, I’d need a carpenter’s saw and probably a chisel. The best I can do is peel the membrane back far enough to see as much of his lungs as possible.”

  After Getorius made further incisions along the lower rib line, Arcadia held back the skin. “That large organ must be his heart.”

  “Yes. I had no idea it would be that big, yet, according to Hippocrates, it’s the center of man’s intellect.” He probed the lung mass. “It looks like a sponge soaked in bloody water. Christ, nothing evaporated! The man drowned in his own phlegm.”

  Getorius sensed acrid bile rising in his throat. Despite the chill air he was sweating.

  His stomach felt sick, the way it once had after he ate spoiled oysters. Even the faint fragrance of bread was nauseating.

  “Are you feeling ill?” Arcadia asked, noticing her husband’s pale face.

  “I…think this is all I can manage to do just now.”

  “You wanted to try repairing tendons in a hand.”

  “Another time. Get me a little wine. Nothing sweet…the local Venetia in the cabinet.”

  While Arcadia went to pour the vintage into a cup, Getorius covered Marios’ body again. His hands felt cold and greasy. “Pour some wine here,” he said, holding them over the bowl.

  Arcadia held up the cup for him. “Take a sip first.”

  Getorius gulped a swallow, then rubbed hard to wash away bits of flesh with the wine she splashed on his hands. Afterward, he dried them on a towel, more vigorously than he needed to, in order to purge the clammy sensation.

  “How do you feel?” he asked her.

  “Probably just a little less queasy than you.” Arcadia glanced toward the covered body. “What will you do now with the…with Marios?”

  “Bury him, just as I promised.”

  “His body is mutilated, how will you get him out of here? Even vagrants are given a presbyter’s final rites at the graveside.”

  “I could say he died of plague. Few presbyters would risk it, and no one would ask questions.”

  “Getorius, a lie, too?” Arcadia admonished softly.

  “Right. Let me think.” He reflected a moment, and then reached for her hand. “Send Brisios to the docks for a piece of sailcloth. We’ll wrap Marios in that, a shroud, with just his face showing for the anointing. Then we’ll get Presbyter Tranquillus from Holy Cross basilica. He won’t see anything of the actual body.”

  “Good. Now try to get a little rest before your first patient. I don’t imagine you’ll be eating breakfast?”

  “Ah…no. Tell Agrica that I’m not feeling well.”

  “Alright. And then I’m joining you in bed for a while.”

  Getorius stared at the bedroom ceiling in the half-light and pondered on what he had discovered. There was no reservoir of phlegm in the dead man’s skull, yet the fluid had unmistakably originated in his head. Where? Was there another cavity, perhaps above the nose, where phlegm was produced? Galen described it a result of the Cold-Moist imbalance that developed in people who had been exposed to too much cold. That had surely brought on the condition in Marios.

  The man’s lungs were sopping wet. Had the evaporation process Galen described gone wrong, or was the physician’s basic theory flawed? Perhaps human lungs worked differently.

  When Arcadia joined her husband on the bed, she reached over to touch his face. “I know what you’re thinking, Getorius. You’ll want to do this again, but you can’t let it become another obsession.”

  “Pandora,” he said, chuckling.

  “Who? And why are you laughing?”

  “Pandora,” Getorius repeated. “If we ever speak of today again—of Marios—we’ll use the name Pandora.”

  “The first perfect Roman woman.”

  “Greek, actually, and she couldn’t contain her curiosity either.”

  “Like you.” After a pause, Arcadia turned to him. “Getorius, one day I’d like to open a clinic just for women.”

  “What gave you that idea?”

  “Soranus’ book on gynecology. I’m sure many women don’t come in for treatment just because you’re a man.”

  “I can’t help that. Besides, they can hire midwives.”

  “For births. I’m thinking of other illnesses.”

  Getorius raised himself on an elbow and kissed her forehead. “You’re doing well in the clinic, Arcadia, but you need much more experience. Dissecting—Pandora—shows that I do too.”

  “I could hire the best midwives in town to—”

  He shushed her with a finger against her lips. “We’ll talk of it later. How many patients do you suppose we have?”

  Arcadia eased herself off the bed, annoyed at his indifferent attitude. “I’ll get them ready.”

  Getorius lay back again and closed his eyes. Although he had been clever to disguise the dissection by referring to it with the name of a girl in a Greek myth, if he talked about the dissection, he now recalled that curiosity had almost been the undoing of the first Pandora.

  The weather turned dank. Dark clouds scudded in from the northeast, bringing sleet and snow down from the Norican Alps, which blew across the broad valley of the Padus River and into Ravenna itself. Fountains were glazed over, forcing slaves to break through the ice in the mornings to draw water. If children enjoyed the novelty of licking the white fluff off evergreen branches, and sliding on icy streets, their parents cursed the slush and mud tracked into houses and shops. Glittering marshes around the city walls were crusted with a coating of ice well into the day. Work on the docks ceased as stevedores clustered around fires instead of unloading snowbound cargoes from the last galleys that had arrived.

  Ancient medical writers, and some philosophers, agreed that the body’s functions were controlled by warm, cold, dry and moist conditions. The abrupt change in the autumn climate, from warm and clear, to cold and wet, was proof. A larger number of patients came to Getorius for relief. At best, they suffered from an increase in phlegm imbalances that caused headaches, fevers and constantly runny noses. At worst, older people went home to die in cold rooms before the imbalance could be leveled again.

  Marios’ linen-wrapped body was hardly noticed among those of the many vagrants who died from exposure and were given a hasty burial in the paupers’ cemetery near the Church of the Apostles.

  Feletheus returned the manuscripts without coming to a conclusion. Getorius decided that Theokritos’s lack of interest stemmed from cynicism—he had said that all cults had their own prophets. The old forum philosopher had once ridiculed a prediction that the world would end in the five-hundredth year after Christ’s birth. The date was still some six decades away, but other more recent predictions of deadlines for Armageddon had passed without incident. Bishop Chrysologos occasionally warned against consulting ‘seers, wise women and self-styled prophets,’ especially those who used a copy of the Testaments for divination.

  Getorius started to believe that Behan’s enigmatic ‘prophecy,’ announcing an imminent event of earthshaking consequence, was no more than the delusion of a lonely monk.

  Chapter six

  Arcadia was at the Lord’s Day service when she caught a glimpse of Publius Maximin wearing a toga—a lingering prerogative
of his senatorial rank—and suddenly remembered the invitation to Galla Placidia’s dinner, which was only six days away. She felt the Senator was too important a man to approach for advice on clothing, so the next day she went to the senate house in the old forum with her seamstress, Veneranda, to look at statues of past emperors and civic officials.

  “Have you made a toga before?” Arcadia asked Veneranda, once she had let her observe the complicated drapery folds on a statue of Caesar Augustus.

  “No, Domina. Only senators wear them now. They’re made by house slaves.”

  “Can you figure out how to drape the cloth?”

  “I think so. I know it’s semi-circular, probably two and a half cubits long and about half that width. I have a friend in Senator Maximin’s household. She’ll help me.”

  “Fine.” Arcadia glanced around at the sculptures, all of men. “There are no females here. If we went out to the old Roman necropolis along the Via Armini, perhaps we could find a woman’s figure on some tomb statuary.”

  Leaving the senate house, the two walked east along the Via Caesar to the Via Muri Antiqui, a street that followed the ancient walls that Honorius had ordered torn down after he made Ravenna the Western capital of the empire. They turned right at the Armini, an arrow-straight road that was a paved-over canal that had once connected the city with a branch of the Padus River, to the north. The Armini led to a naval base at Classis, some two miles south, then on to connect with the Via Aemilia along the Adriatic coast.

  “Your friend is fortunate to be in the senator’s house,” Arcadia commented. “I understand Maximin is very wealthy.”

  “Fortunate?” Veneranda retorted in surprise. “She’s a slave, Domina. I’m a freewoman.”

  Arcadia was immediately sorry she had initiated a conversation about unbridgeable social differences. “Perhaps your friend could buy her freedom,” she suggested lamely.

  “The senator doesn’t need money. Bassa told me he once spent a quarter million gold coins in sponsoring his son’s games at Rome.”