Science Metropolis – Boston

Where do you shelve a book written by a surgeon? This morning, I wouldn’t have thought this to be a trick question. When Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and best-selling author writes a book, copies fly off the science and medicine stacks. Then I listened to Dr. Allan J. Hamilton, a professor of surgery at the University of Arizona Health Science Center, and learned the real answer — it depends on the surgeon.

Dr. Hamilton came to the Harvard Coop in Cambridge this evening to sign copies of his first book, “The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope.” As the title reveals, the book fuses medicine and faith. Here is a surgeon who writes about “the soul,” “the creator,” and “miracles,” alongside his experiences removing brain tumors and immunizing children in developing nations. So, where in the bookstore can we find Dr. Hamilton?

According to Amazon.com, “The Scalpel,” is in the top 25 bestsellers in the Spiritual Healing category. At The Coop, it can be found within the New Age section. Even the location of the book signing, held on the third floor between rows Bibles and Marxist texts, seemed to remove Dr. Hamilton’s medical authority. Leading medical writer, Dr. Gawande, also writes about ethical and philosophical issues – especially the imperfections and humanity of medicine – but doesn’t come to conclusions based on faith. What separates Dr. Gawande from Dr. Hamilton, then, doesn’t seem to be medical experience, but interpretation.

Dr. Hamilton told a story from his days as an intern at Massachusetts General Hospital about a boy who suffered severe burns and fell into a coma. As he continued to reject several skin-graft surgeries, the boy’s father, perhaps from the stress of the whole thing, had a heart attack and died. The boy’s mother asked if the father’s skin could be grafted, in the chance there might be a genetic match. The doctors tried and after the surgery, Dr. Hamilton was called into the boy’s room. “What happened to my father?” the boy asked. Dr. Hamilton, not wanting to upset him after his sudden recovery, told the boy his father was fine. “If that’s so, why is he standing at the edge of my bed?” the boy responded. “What a miraculous thing to happen,” concluded Dr. Hamilton. Would Dr. Gawande have called this a miracle or peppered his words with a bit of skepticism?

At the end of his talk, Dr. Hamilton discussed some ways spirituality can help in recovery, although, what he called spirituality could be interpreted as a self-generated placebo. One of his rules is to not let statistics, which doctors rely on to gauge the course of a disease, predict the outcome. Although controversial, his advice is a tool for potential patients, and that’s who Dr. Hamilton’s audience is. He did not write a collection of essays recounting the peculiar world of the OR, he wrote a book of stories to help patients and medical professionals incorporate their spiritual selves into the often-cold environment of the hospital.

While this book may just be a work of pseudoscience written by a surgeon, it does no harm. Since many patients identify as religious or spiritual, the positive thinking one can take away from “The Scalpel” may be just as good a medicine as anything Dr. Gawande orders.