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Summary Of The Knife By Richard Selzer

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In Richard Selzer’s “The Knife,” the veteran surgeon contemplates the profound power of his most important tool: the scalpel. As he discusses his experience of surgery, Selzer manipulates language with a variety of comparisons that show he understands the technical purpose of his profession even as he views his approach as that of an artist. One of the most consistent images that pervades the essay is that of vegetation and gardens. Fittingly, as Selzer contemplates his initial interest in medicine, he does so as a child in a solarium—an Eden of sorts. He conflates the smell of lilac and chrysanthemums with the “soap and starch and clean linen” of the hospital (97). Paradoxically, he associates the redolence of his innocence (as represented …show more content…

Within this framework, it also makes that he calls the diaphragm of a human a “leaf” (95) and “crack[s] open” a patient’s flesh “like a ripe melon…in springtime” (102). For the veteran surgeon, he finds his own personal Eden in his work—a garden of ever-fascinating flowers and fruits. Furthermore, Selzer extends this metaphor with the image of the Ant and the tumor. The Ant in the surgery room literally brings death and disease, but Selzer refers to it figuratively as the “Ant of the Absurd” (99); in other words, the Ant represents anything and everything that cannot be explained rationally. And for a scientist, reason is everything. Both to save his patient and his own existential identity, Selzer employs another garden-esque verb as he “pluck[s]” the Ant from the operating table. Similarly, the tumor is characterized as “fungoid” (104)—an interloper in Selzer’s garden. A fungus is not a plant, but it grows in the same soil, and like an invading ant, it is unpredictable and must be

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Doctors are infamous for their unreadable writing; Richard Selzer is not one of those doctors. A talented surgeon, Selzer has garnered critical acclaim for his captivating operating room tales, and rightfully so. A perfect exhibition of this is The Knife, a detailed illustration of a surgery. What may seem like an uninteresting event is made mesmerizing by Selzer’s magnificent account of the human body and the meticulousness that goes into repairing it. The rhetorical appeals, tone, and figurative language that Selzer uses throughout The Knife provide the reader with a vivid description of the sacred process of surgery.

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