The luminous autopsy: Memory, fact, and the ritualization of experience

“ Davenport assented, drily, “but not the detection. You youngsters don’t know what you’re talking about—you’d better shut up.”
“We know a lot,” returned Monroe, unabashed. “Youth is no barrier to knowledge these days. And I hold that the clever detective seeks first the motive. You can’t have a murder without a motive, any more than an omelette without eggs.”
“True, oh, Solomon,” granted the doctor. “But the motive may be known only to the murderer, and not to be discovered by any effort of the investigator.” ”

“ Do not employ a hammer or a chisel.
Remember that it is dangerous to attend lying-in women after making an autopsy.
If the mortuary attendant does the manual work you must watch each step.
If portions of organs are retained for subsequent examination, have the fact witnessed.
Drawing up a Medico-legal Report.
In most cases the witness must recite the report in open court.
For a complete investigation three sets of facts must be collated:
1. The details of the environment of the corpse, when and where first seen.
2. The personality and personal history [Pg 25] of the deceased. ”

“ Genuine piety cannot long be concealed in the heart without manifesting itself by exterior practices of religion; hence, though interior and exterior worship are distinct, they cannot be separated in the present life. Fire cannot burn without sending forth flame and heat. Neither can the fire of devotion burn in the soul without being reflected on the countenance and even in speech. It is natural for man to express his sentiments by signs and ceremonies, for “from the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh;” ”

“ In looking down my vistas of the past year, I see Paris reacting differently to almost every great day.
On Armistice Night we went mad. From the exaltés to the saddest and most imperturbable, Parisians spent their feelings. The joy was acute because it was the celebration of the end of the killing. When a soldier is frank and you know him well he will tell you, "Any man who claims not to be afraid at the front is lying." That fear was gone. Men could unlearn blood-lust: and with honor now. ”

“ The associationist habit is there; and, in accordance with it, we find men maintaining that, by the mere effect of contiguity, the perception of a sound brings back the memory of the sound and memories bring back the corresponding ideas. And then, we have the cerebral lesions which seem to bring about a destruction of memories; more particularly, in the case we are studying, there are the lesions of the brain found in word deafness. ”

“ The weakness of the brain evinces itself in impairment of memory; in slowness of apprehension; in inability to fix the thoughts long on one thing; and the tendency, therefore, to wander from one subject to another, and to travel to and fro, which may pass on to want of control, or imbecility, or even to dementia, This last, saddest state of all, was witnessed only in two of our centenarians. Indeed, the brain in many held out as well as or better than other organs—which may be regarded one of the bright rays, if not the brightest, in the centenarian landscape. ”

“ The poor, short, lone fact dies at the birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven, and bathes it in [67] immortal waters. ”

“ All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom? I cry you mercy, good shoe-box! I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no base fact or event can ever give. There are no days so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination. ”

“ In the primitive days of the Church Christianity was not tolerated by the Pagan world. The Christians were, consequently, obliged to assemble for public worship in the Catacombs of Rome and other secret places. These Catacombs, or subterranean rooms, still exist, and are objects of deep interest to the pious stranger visiting the Eternal City. As these hidden apartments did not admit the light of the sun, the faithful were obliged to have lights even [pg 334] in open day. In commemoration of the event the Church has retained the use of lights on her altars. ”

“ If pure recollection is already spirit, and if pure perception is still in a sense matter, we ought to be able, by placing ourselves at their meeting place, to throw some light on the reciprocal action of spirit and matter. 'Pure,' that is to say instantaneous, perception is, in fact, only an ideal, an extreme. Every perception fills a certain depth of duration, prolongs the past into the present, and thereby partakes of memory. ”

“ The capital error, the error which, passing over from psychology into metaphysic, shuts us outPure perception and pure memory constantly intermingle. in the end from the knowledge both of body and of spirit, is that which sees only a difference of intensity, instead of a difference of nature, between pure perception and memory. Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories, and inversely, a memory, as we shall show later, only becomes actual by borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips. ”

“ The truth is that memory does not consist in a regression from the present to the past, but, on the contrary, in a progress from the past to the present. It is in the past that we place ourselves at a stroke. We start from a 'virtual state' which we lead onwards, step by step, through a series of different planes of consciousness, up to the goal where it is materialized in an actual perception; that is to say, up to the point where it becomes a present, active state; in fine, up to that extreme plane of our consciousness against which our body stands out. ”

“ Why, be I never so careful in my diagnosis or treatment, a chance deviation from my orders on the part of patient or attendant, a chance draught of wind, or upset nerves—oh, Lord, yes! as the Good Book says, ‘Time and Chance happeneth to us all.’ And no line of work is more precarious than establishing a theory or running down a clew in a murder case. ”

“ When we come to look the question in the face, however, the mere number of cells and fibers in the human brain, immense as it undoubtedly is, would surely never suffice for the almost infinite variety of perceptions and facts with which our memory alone (not to mention any other mental faculty) is so abundantly stored. Suppose, for example, we take merely the human beings, living or extinct, with whose names or personalities we are more or less fully acquainted, and try to give a cell or a fiber or a ganglion to each ”

“ When you come to handle life and death as your daily business, your memory will of itself bid good-by to such inmates as the well-known foramina of the sphenoid bone and the familiar oxides of methyl-ethylamyl-phenyl-ammonium. Be thankful that you have once known them, and remember that even the learned ignorance of a nomenclature is something to have mastered, and may furnish pegs to hang facts upon which would otherwise have strewed the floor of memory in loose disorder. ”

“ The alleged destruction of memories by an injury to the brain is but a break in the continuous progress by which they actualize themselves. And, consequently, if we insist on localizing the auditory memory of words, for instance, in a given part of the brain, we shall be led by equally cogent reasons to distinguish this image-centre from the perceptive centre or to confound the two in one. ”

“ By deduction from this law, many of the more special laws which experience shows to exist among particular mental phenomena may be demonstrated and explained: the ease and rapidity, for instance, with which thoughts connected with our passions or our more cherished interests are excited, and the firm hold which the facts relating to them have on our memory; the vivid recollection we retain of minute circumstances which accompanied any object or event that deeply interested us, and of the times and places in which we have been very happy or very miserable ”

“ Each year Paris went to the review with pride not unmixed with anxiety. There was a serious aspect impossible for the stranger to realize and appreciate. After all, the army was not a small body of men who had given themselves to a military career. It was the youth of the nation performing a duty imposed upon it by the geographical position of France. The army was the nation in arms, an institution as necessary for well-being and security as the police. Longchamp on the Quatorze was the assurance that the job of protecting France was being well looked after. ”

“ We do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct; they are the more like the heavens.
Of what moment are facts that can be lost,—which need to be commemorated? The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The pyramids do not tell the tale that was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself. Why look in the dark for light? Strictly speaking, the historical societies have not recovered one fact from oblivion, but are themselves, instead of the fact, that is lost. The researcher is more memorable than the researched. ”

“ Clinical cases and experimental facts go further to invalidate the theory of the purely physical interpretation of the subconscious, or what may be described as automatism-psychology. If anything is of the utmost importance in mental life, it is surely memory. Memory forms a unity of our life, brings, so to speak, to a focus our life-experiences, which would have otherwise been disconnected, confused, and chaotic. ”

“ In fact, this is just what consciousness bears witness to whenever, in order to analyse memory, it follows the movement of memory at work. Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first in the past in general, then in a certain region of the past—a work of adjustment, something like the focussing of a camera. ”

“ Between the plane of action—the plane in which our body has condensed its past into motor habits,—and the plane of pure memory, where our mind retains in all its details the picture of our past life, we believe that we can discover thousands of different planes of consciousness, a thousand integral and yet diverse repetitions of the whole of the experience through which we have lived. ”

“ One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;—but the accidents or trivial marks which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also. ”

“ We are now about to consider these intermediate states, and distinguish in each of them the part which belongs to nascent action, that is to say of the brain, and the part of independent memory, that is to say of memory-images. What are these states? Being partly motor they must, on our hypothesis, prolong a present perception; but, on the other hand, inasmuch as they are images, they reproduce past perceptions. Now the concrete process by which we grasp the past in the present is recognition. Recognition, therefore, is what we have to study, to begin with. ”

“ As we shall endeavour to show, even the 'subjectivity' of sensible qualities consists above all else in a kind of contraction of the real, effected by our memory. In short, memory in these two forms, covering as it does with a cloak of recollections a core of immediate perception, and also contracting a number of external moments into a single internal moment, constitutes the principal share of individual consciousness in perception, the subjective side of the knowledge of things ”

“ And as these two aspects of perception, quality and movement, have been made equally obscure, the phenomenon of perception, in which a consciousness, assumed to be shut up in itself and foreign to space, is supposed to translate what occurs in space, becomes a mystery.—But let us, on the contrary, banish all preconceived idea of interpreting or measuring, let us place ourselves face to face with immediate reality: at once we find that there is no impassable barrier, no essential difference, no real distinction even, between perception and the thing perceived, between quality and movement. ”

“ What they place at the origin of consciousness is either the useless duplicate of an external reality or the inert material of an intellectual construction entirely disinterested: but they always neglect the relation of perception with action and of memory with conduct. Now, it is no doubt possible to conceive, as an ideal limit, a memory and a perception that are disinterested; but, in fact, it is towards action that memory and perception are turned; it is action that the body prepares. Do we consider perception? ”

“ It is but a small part of our experience in life that we are ever able articulately to recall. And yet the whole of it has had its influence in shaping our character and defining our tendencies to judge and act. Although the ready memory is a great blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having once had to do with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of their education. This is true even in professional education. The doctor, the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. ”