New York, NY -- We all want to believe in something more. Look around. Many of us attend weekly worship services. Others sate our spiritual hunger by reading books on the subject or practicing yoga and meditation. And it's a rare person indeed who won't pray feverishly to...Someone...when a beloved family member is in danger. Yet, if we're honest, most of us will admit we have, at best, an uneasy truce between our spiritual and our rational sides. As much as we want to think we don't just "flicker out" at the moment of death, it's a hard sell in the science- and technology-driven 21st century.
It's sad but true. "Believers" are often viewed as fanatics, as nave or uneducated, or simply as wishful thinkers. But when a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon—a member of the profession least prone to flights of fancy—admits the likelihood of a consciousness that survives beyond the body and the physical brain, well, it's hard to dismiss him.
"I am one of the least likely people I know to believe in the supernatural, let alone openly discuss it," admits Allan J. Hamilton, MD, FACS, script consultant for Grey's Anatomy and author of The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope (Penguin Group, 2008, ISBN: 978-1-58542-615-7, $23.95). "Doctors are trained to disregard the inexplicable and unbelievable. Ours is a world of clinical data, physical evidence, and hard facts. And yet, I can't deny all the things I've heard, seen, and experienced."
Hamilton, a professor of neurosurgery and a clinical professor in the departments of Radiation Oncology and Psychology at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, says he's been privy to many supernatural encounters over the past thirty years. Uncanny coincidences. Comforting near-death experiences. Visions, premonitions, even an exorcism. What's more, he adds, colleagues have confided in him that they too have had encounters they can't explain—but to talk publicly about them risks their credibility.
It seems Hamilton has no such fears. In The Scalpel and the Soul, he challenges the assumption that science and spirituality are mutually exclusive. Through first-hand experiences, he validates the spiritual manifestations physicians see every day, and explores how premonition, superstition, hope, and faith not only affect how patients feel but can also change medical outcomes.
The real-life stories that appear throughout this gorgeously written book, many featuring patients cared for by the author, enthrall and inspire readers. More to the point, they illuminate some of the most powerful "life lessons" Hamilton has learned from his experiences both in and out of the operating room. Here are just a few of those lessons:
Magic, signs, and visions really do exist. Only our culture prevents us from seeing them. In The Scalpel and the Soul, Hamilton recounts his travels to a remote part of Africa to serve as a surgical fellow in a ramshackle hospital. While there, he visited several jungle villages reachable only by river. He and a native river guide had to ply the raging currents in a dugout canoe. At one point they got hopelessly lost on their way to Tan-Beang, losing an entire day. Pulling over at a fork in the river, they met a man who informed them he had been told in a dream that they were on their way, that they were lost, and that he should wait there so he could lead them to his village. However, he continued, in the dream the two men had arrived yesterday.
Hamilton was dumbfounded. With no phones, telegrams, radios, or drums, there was no rational way the man could have known that they were coming, that they would beach at that spot, or that they were a day late. The obvious conclusion, he realized, was that "something, some force, had sent him to help us." In Africa, he writes, he lost much of his faith in science and began to have a deeper appreciation for the power of magic, taboo, curses, and visions.
"It's easy to scoff at beliefs in the supernatural when we do not understand their foundations," he writes. "Magic becomes apparent when the world cannot be negotiated without its application. Then, we do need to let ourselves believe. We do. Africa taught me that the supernatural lies just beneath the surface. It only took a small, definite shift in one's vantage point to see it."
Respect your superstitions. They can serve you in practical (and powerful) ways. Hamilton says he chooses to be superstitious, and it generally serves him and his patients well. Dreams, signs, omens, rituals—they all play very real roles in his day-to-day decisions. "For example, I have learned to never hesitate to cancel a surgery if the patient feels unlucky on that day, or has a premonition of impending death," he writes.
"Once, I was driving into the hospital to perform surgery when I had to suddenly slam on the brakes because three buzzards were standing in the middle of the road, shredding the carcass of a dead jackrabbit," he continues. "When I got to the hospital, as my patient was being wheeled into my operating room, I heard his wife lean over him, kiss him on the forehead, and refer to him as 'my little bunny.' I canceled the case. The warning of the buzzards was not a coincidence. Four hours later, the man suffered a massive heart attack. It probably would have been a fatal one had it occurred in the middle of my surgery—if I hadn't heeded the warning from those buzzards."
When it's your time to go, even "perfect Harvard numbers" can't save you. Hamilton writes about Rocky, a homeless man who was a frequent visitor in the Boston ER where he served as a surgical intern. The "old lone wolf of the North End" reported that his dead son Jackie had appeared to him in a dream to say that they would shortly be together. Hamilton doubted that: Rocky had "perfect Harvard numbers," meaning all his physiological functions were in the normal range. He arranged to have Rocky transferred, despite his protestations that he was "going to see Jackie." And despite all the reassuring data, Rocky died suddenly as he was being admitted to his new facility.
"My experience with Rocky, in fact with many patients, showed me that people often know when death is approaching," reflects Hamilton. "It doesn't matter what the machines say, what the textbooks say, what the doctor says. It doesn't matter what measures anyone takes. When it's your time, it's your time. And one of the hardest things for me as a young physician to learn was that death is not always a defeat. Rocky was happy to be joining his lost son. For him death was a joyful reunion. So it is for many."
Unshakeable faith can commute a death sentence. One of the most memorable characters in The Scalpel and the Soul is Mrs. Louisiana Desire Hilts. A strong-willed, devoutly religious woman, Mrs. Hilts was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Dr. Michelsen, Hamilton's colleague, estimated that she had less than four months to live. However, Mrs. Hilts refused to accept her death sentence, declaring that the Lord needed her alive to look after Beau, her severely impaired, hydrocephalic three-year-old grandson. (Hamilton was Beau's doctor, which is how he came to meet Mrs. Hilts.)
"The Lord has given me this child for a reason," she declared. "I cannot imagine that He would place this dear, retarded child in my care if He did not intend for me to be here to take care of him. So I have prayed to the Lord to give me the strength and resolve to endure and survive all of your chemotherapy, Dr. Michelsen. I believe that the Lord will assist me utterly to succeed. In that, I have more faith than you can imagine."
"Mrs. Hilts proved to be correct," recounts Hamilton. "Beau made an astonishing recovery in his intellectual abilities and eventually went on to trade school where he learned how to build beautiful, ornate bird houses. One of them is currently in the meditation garden of the Cancer Center. Beau also got married. His grandmother was at his wedding...Last year, at the ripe old age of 88, Mrs. Hilts spoke the following words to a cancer survivor group: 'You need to be a realist to believe in miracles, because one can only see the real truth with the heart and not with the eyes.'"
Yes, Virginia, there is a soul! Medically speaking, the story of Sarah Gideon is more than amazing. It's impossible. This thirty-four-year-old woman had a highly dangerous brain surgery to repair a deadly aneurism. She was put into suspended animation, a clinical "brain death" during which all neural functioning ceases. Yet, after the procedure, she baffled her surgeons by repeating snippets of conversation surgical staff members had engaged in while operating. Not only that, when Hamilton probed her later, she was able to recall physical details about the room in which her surgery took place and the staff who was with her that day.
"To put this into an everyday context, it would be equivalent to stumbling upon a light bulb (consciousness) that could stay illuminated without any electricity (the brain)," he writes. "All along we had believed the light bulb could generate light only when electrical current flowed through it to make the filament glow brightly. Given our present finding in [Sarah Gideon], we were faced with a radical new paradigm: bulbs don't need electricity at all to glow. But then we must ask ourselves: if bulbs don't need the flow of current, then how do they work?"
So what lit up the "light bulb" that was Sarah Gideon's consciousness? Hamilton believes the answer is clear (if a bit archaic sounding): the soul. No grand pronouncements accompany this conclusion or any of the others he has reached throughout his career. Rather, he wishes that the medical community would simply admit that science simply doesn't have all the answers.
"So what do we, in the field of medicine, do with unsettling disturbances, the supernatural ripples?" writes Dr. Hamilton. "Ignore them? Ban their discussion? Or do we declare them simply to be a puzzling mixture of science and spirit? Can we not, as doctors, allow ourselves to entertain the possibility that the supernatural, the divine, and the magical may all underlie our physical world? Would we not be the richer for just challenging our imaginations? Don't we owe it to those who come after us to, at least, raise the questions?
"I know if I have questions, so too will other doctors and patients who come after me," he adds. "This is my turn to speak up. I am doing so because I feel that, maybe for the first time, in my own life and my career, I know what I am supposed to do. I'm not looking for extrinsic guidance from my peers or the scientific literature. I am content to be just what I am: amazed and excited about the possibilities."
About the Author:
Allan Hamilton is a Harvard-trained brain surgeon. He currently holds four professorships at the University of Arizona: his primary appointment as Professor of Neurosurgery, as well as being a Professor in the Departments of Radiation Oncology, Psychology, and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He and his wife, Jane, own a small ranch on the outskirts of Tucson where they once raised three children and now raise Lipizzaner horses and Brangus cattle. They conduct horse-training and equine-assisted learning clinics around the United States and Europe.
About the Book:
The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope (Penguin Group, 2008, ISBN: 978-1-58542-615-7, $23.95) is available at bookstores nationwide and from all major online booksellers.
Copyright 2008, DeHart & Company
