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By Root 1359 0

I'd set it aside. I didn't feel guilty about not following through; I never had time to seek out Thomas Stone, and moreover, wherever he was, I never felt as if I was in his America. I was on an island, a protectorate, a territory that America claimed only in name. In carrying his textbook with me from Addis to Sudan and Kenya and then to America, I had developed a grudging respect for the author. I told myself that the book was my touchstone to Sister Mary Joseph Praise: I saw her hand in the line drawings and I carried the bookmark with her handwriting in my wallet. I'd discovered Thomas Stone in the text, just as he must have discovered himself in the discipline of making notes in a landscape of disease and poverty overcoming his fatigue to fill exercise books with his observations. I was convinced that it was the accumulation of these journals that he pulled together to form a textbook. In doing so, he made his knowledge incarnate.

But when that writer, the sole living author of my DNA, stood peering over my shoulder, it was flesh that became incarnate, flesh of my flesh, with a scent that I should have recognized as kin and a voice that was my inheritance. When he leaned over the patient's belly to see our handiwork, cocked his skull on the atlas and axis vertebrae just so, tucked his arms to his chest, his scapulae gliding out, making himself small so as not to contaminate our field—those movements were echoes of my own.

Surely Thomas Stone sensed some disturbance in the universe and that is why he appeared in our theater. I confess when I didn't know who he was, I felt nothing: no aura, no tingling, nothing other than pride in the miracle Deepak had performed with PVC tube and the uncommon skill in his hands, a skill that the stranger appreciated. When I learned our visitor was Thomas Stone, I was unprepared. Should my first reaction have been anger? Righteousness? I had missed my chance to react while he was there. But now, for the first time since childhood, I wanted to do more than study his nine-fingered portrait. I wanted to know about the living, breathing surgeon who had stood next to me.

In the days that followed, I looked up Thomas Stone in Index Medicus in our library, pulling down one by one the oversize volumes, beginning with 1954, the year of my birth. I wanted to know about the post– Short Practice Stone; I wanted to see what scholarly contributions he had made after leaving the tropics. Ours was a small library, but Popsy had donated his collection of surgical journals dating back to the fifties. I found most of the papers listed in Index Medicus.

In my notebook I plotted out Thomas Stone's scientific career as reflected in his published work. In America his interest was liver surgery, and his career was interwoven with the history of transplantation, with the audacious idea of taking an organ from Peter to save the life of Paul. The story began well before Stone, of course, with Sir Peter Medawar and Sir Macfarlane Burnet in the 1940s, who showed us how the immune system recognizes “self” from foreign tissues and rejects and destroys the latter. Two months before our birth, Thomas Stone published a letter to the editor of the British Medical Journal describing the extraordinary length and redundancy of the colon of many Ethiopians, which he believed explained why it so readily twisted on itself—a condition called sigmoid volvulus. By 1967, when Christian Barnard in Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital re placed Lewis Washkansky's scarred and diseased heart with the heart of young Denise Darvall, killed in a car wreck, my father, now in Boston, had become interested in liver resection. His research question was, how much liver could you cut away and still leave enough behind to sustain life?

The transplant field in America was led by a brilliant surgeon— another Thomas, this one with the last name of Starzl. Working in Colorado, Starzl did the first human liver transplants in ‘63 and ‘64, but neither patient survived. Thomas Stone of Boston, the footnotes will show, also tried and failed in ‘65.