As Arcadia treated the affected regions, she noted, “He was also hosting colonies of scabies mites.”
“Poor fellow didn’t have the few coppers needed to get into the public baths. Bring me the auger while I shave a section of scalp.”
Getorius knew Galen had taught that the brain was a large gland whose function was to produce phlegm. He would drill an opening in the skull and allow excess mucus to drain out. Then he could remove a section of bone and try to locate an abnormality in the organ that might account for the imbalance. He had done such a procedure on a cat, but the animal had been healthy and nothing leaked out. It would be different with Marios.
Arcadia came back with the boring tool. While waiting for Getorius to finish shaving a patch of Marios’s hair, she noticed a crust of dried mucus that had run from the man’s nose, but it was no more than when he had been alive.
“Getorius, this is puzzling. Herodotus wrote that the brain has an outlet through the nostrils. Embalmers used the opening to remove the organ when preparing a body for mummification.”
“I know what Herodotus wrote. Bring a bowl over here, I’m ready.”
Arcadia brought the clay vessel and held it under the shaved area. Getorius centered the auger on the white skin, then paused. “What was your point about Herodotus?” he asked in a more gentle tone.
“If the brain produces phlegm, as Galen believed, wouldn’t the excess have leaked out overnight through this man’s nose?”
Getorius shrugged a gesture of ignorance in reply, and began a slow turning of the bronze drill. The sound of metal crunching through bone made Arcadia flinch, but she forced herself to watch. In moments her hands began to tremble.
“Hold that bowl in place, woman,” Getorius snapped. “I can’t do both.”
She steadied the vessel. Getorius’ breath steamed in the cold air of the room as he strained against the bone’s resistance. When the auger bored through with a sudden thrust, he pulled back quickly, expecting a gush of mucus through the opening. Only a trickle of clear fluid dripped into the bowl.
“That’s strange,” he said, confused. “The man was snorting like a leviathan earlier, yet nothing came out.”
“Could it have drained into his chest? You know how people spit up phlegm when they have an imbalance.”
“Perhaps. I want to look at his lungs anyway.” Getorius felt at the sternum and rib cage. “Undernourished. Sad, but it will make my work easier. Get me that monkey skeleton. The bone connections should be similar.”
He expected to find a quantity of blood in the two spongy masses. Galen’s observations with apes concluded that the blood pumped into lungs evaporated and was breathed out as a gas. Getorius had found no proof of this in his own animal dissections, yet conceded that humans might be different. Marios had in fact been spitting blood, an imbalance that could give credibility to Galen’s theory.
Glancing at the room’s high windows, Getorius saw a faint tint of blue coloring the panes. Dawn would come quickly, and with it the first patients. He could smell bread from the baker’s shop on the corner, and hear Agrica clanking pans together to show that she was preparing breakfast for the household.
“Bolt the door,” he ordered Arcadia, after she came in with the skeleton. “We don’t need the cook coming in here to ask how we want our pan of eggs.”
Taking up a piece of charred wood from the grate, Getorius eyed the monkey thorax bones. While Arcadia held a lamp, he traced a rectangle on the left side of Marios’s chest, estimating the man to have been about thirty years old. His musculature and various scars on his body suggested that he might have worked as a stevedore at one time, but poor food and excessive drinking had wasted his body to the extent that he had not been able to counterbalance the humor imbalance that had made this his final illness.
Following the dark line, Getorius made an incision along the ridge of the sternum to open a flap of skin and gain access inside the rib cavity. The skin membrane proved to be tougher than that of an animal, which usually peeled away with its fur.
“Use that forceps to hold back the bluish membrane,” he told Arcadia, then blurted out, “Look at the size of his rib cage! I can’t cut through it with the instruments I have, I’d need a carpenter’s saw and probably a chisel. The best I can do is peel the membrane back far enough to see as much of his lungs as possible.”
After Getorius made further incisions along the lower rib line, Arcadia held back the skin. “That large organ must be his heart.”
“Yes. I had no idea it would be that big, yet, according to Hippocrates, it’s the center of man’s intellect.” He probed the lung mass. “It looks like a sponge soaked in bloody water. Christ, nothing evaporated! The man drowned in his own phlegm.”
Getorius sensed acrid bile rising in his throat. Despite the chill air he was sweating.
His stomach felt sick, the way it once had after he ate spoiled oysters. Even the faint fragrance of bread was nauseating.
“Are you feeling ill?” Arcadia asked, noticing her husband’s pale face.
“I…think this is all I can manage to do just now.”
“You wanted to try repairing tendons in a hand.”
“Another time. Get me a little wine. Nothing sweet…the local Venetia in the cabinet.”
While Arcadia went to pour the vintage into a cup, Getorius covered Marios’ body again. His hands felt cold and greasy. “Pour some wine here,” he said, holding them over the bowl.
Arcadia held up the cup for
