232
The Body Electric
missing a chapter—the one that should have tied it all together and
helped us doctors understand the bodily harmony we were trying to
restore.
When I entered research, I aimed for a fairly limited goal among the
many that lured me—finding out what stimulated and controlled the
growth needed for healing—but always in the back of my mind were
the larger questions that had haunted me since medical school: What
unified an organism, making every cell subservient to the needs of the
whole? How was it that the whole being could do things that none of its
components could do separately? What made an organism self-con-
tained, self-directed, self-repairing? When you get right down to it, I
wanted to know what made living things alive. Intuitively I felt sure the
answers needn't be forever hidden in mystic conundrums but were scien-
tifically knowable. However, they would require a fresh approach from
science, not the simple mechanistic dogmas left over from last century.
As a result of the research on nerves and regeneration described in the
foregoing pages, I believe I can now sketch at least an outline of that
missing chapter.
It had been known for centuries that the nerves are the body's com-
munications lines. Still, all the information collected by neurophysi-
ologists hadn't revealed the integrating factor behind healing. Marc
Singer proved that nerves are essential for regeneration, yet the elaborate
impulse and neurotransmitter system, which until recently constituted
everything we knew about nerves, carries no messages during the pro-
cess. Nerves are just as essential to simpler kinds of healing. Leprosy and
diabetes sometimes destroy nerve function to the extremities. When this
happens, a wounded limb not only fails to heal but often degenerates far
beyond the actual injury. I often thought about this paradox in connec-
tion with the other realities that were poorly explained by nerve im-
pulses, such as consciousness and its many levels, sleep, biological
cycles, and extrasensory experiences. As a doctor, however, I was most
concerned with the mystery of pain.
This is the least understood of sensory functions, but it must have
been one of the very first to evolve. Without it, living things would be
so poorly designed that they couldn't survive, for they would never
know what constituted danger or when to take defensive action. Pain is
quite distinct from the sense of touch. If you place your finger on a hot
stove,
you
feel
the touch
first and the pain appears a discernible time
later, after the reflex has already drawn your hand away. Clearly the pain
is conveyed by a different means. Furthermore, there are different types