NONFICTION - Feb. 13, 1994

RAISING THE DEAD: A Doctor’s Encounter with His Own Mortality by Richard Selzer (Viking: $17.50; 118 pp.). “How can it be,” writes Richard Selzer, “that a lifetime of treating the sick has not prepared him at all for the role of the patient?” In 1991, Selzer, a surgeon, was diagnosed with Legionnaire’s disease and went into a coma. On the 23rd day of the coma, he died for 10 minutes, came back to life, lived through a brief period of dementia in which he inhabited St. Ronan’s monastery in 13th Century Ireland (the food was terrible), and made his way up the Nile to Molokai on a sailing ship to meet Father Damien and the lepers. Upon returning home, Selzer asked to read his chart, only to find that it had been lost. The doctor wrote his own.

In the very beginning, Selzer gives us two examples of writing about illness: the novelist Fanny D’Arblay, writing in the early 1800s about her mastectomy, performed without anesthesia, and John Donne, meditating in the early 1600s on his own acute illness (“an epidemic fever that swept London in 1623 and 1624”). While D’Arblay wrings the literary most from her account, writes Selzer, Donne muses patiently on “the philosophic divine and the meaning of affliction.” This patient aligns himself with Donne, while writing the most beautiful, profound, literary account of what it means to be two beings at once: the traveling soul and the patient rooted to the table, the earth, the body. Both are willful. Selzer wonders if separating the two is no more than a literary device. Who cares! “I, the author, am also there standing, or rather hovering bodiless . . . able to reach down if I wish and touch him, the one lying there on the stretcher who seems to me a small bird perched on an arrow that has been shot from the bow and is flying somewhere. If ever the man wakes up and can speak for himself, I shall have to change pronouns.” You will not forget the metaphors Selzer uses: a coma is like being “ embedded , the way a fly trapped in a chunk of amber must apprehend its plight,” or the tulips someone brings: “seven bald witches lunging for his thoughts.” And it remains a meditation, with no great lessons brought back from the land of the dead. Or perhaps Selzer has heeded the voice of what his mother called “the shushing angel,” who leaves her mark on our upper lips, having warned “the newborn babies not to reveal the secrets of life before birth.”