New Perspectives in Proctology

gris for a proctological giant

What does it mean to be a giant in proctology? A proctological giant? Of course there are people who have made huge contributions to disciplines which don’t have the glamour of neuroscience or law or astrophysics. Not everyone can be a Oliver Wendell Holmes whose decision in “Schenck v. United States” tested the limits of free expression or a Frankfurter who could make his mark in “Brown v. Board of Education." But there are the eminence grises who are responsible for less heralded frankfurters such as the kind which are masticated. Here is where the travails of those unsung heroes, whose plastic gloves have gone where angels fear to tread, begin. You won’t find a famous proctologist popularizing the field in the way Oliver Sacks did neurology in his contributions to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. You are not going to find too many readers of Conde Nast publications who want to know about the way a human being can compensate for abnormalities of the rectum. Dr. Timothy Leary became the poster child for LSD as did Jonas Salk for the vaccine that was named after him. But you are not going to find too many posters or centerfolds of proctological giants. Charmin is not seeking to get a proctologist to provide a superstar endorsement for its product. The famous heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard leaped from the OR to international high society, but the anal sphincter doesn’t produce such celebrity. Like the highly secretive intelligence operatives whose existence is not even recognized by the government, proctologists work to find solutions to those kinds of problems that occur at the end of food’s journey through the body. Nobody would want that journey to wind up in a cul de sac. Would they? Yet few want to talk about much less attend to these matters. Brave proctologists like Chilean miners descend each day into darkness, sacrificing their lives for the sake of assholes.

Freedom

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (l954) and Roe v. Wade (l973) were arguably the two most momentous decisions in Supreme Court history. If the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were direct products of the thinking of Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke. Then Roe v.Wade and Brown v. Board  (which turned over Plessy v Ferguson, the famed “separate but equal” decision of l896) were not only reflections of two great libertarian movements—civil and women’s rights—but also the culmination of an evolutionary process as manifested in jurisprudence. But these two decisions were not only milestones of political, economic and legal thinking. They define an era that began with The New Deal, the Camelot of the Kennedy White House with its resident intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the hope of the troubled Obama Years. When we think about the ideals that manifest themselves in the liberal wings of both the Democratic and Republic parties, Roe v Wade and Brown v. Board redefine the notion of Inalienable Rights. Freedom is the title of Jonathan Franzen’s bestselling novel and it would be hard to imagine this work of fiction and all the complexities of the world it describes without Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board whose outcomes were declarations of new freedoms. Yet Conservative thinkers who criticize these two decisions are probably right. Both Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education extended the notion of human liberty beyond the original intentions of the writers of the Constitution. "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties!" exclaims Hamlet. How will the verdicts  of our 21st Century Supreme Court define or redefine the Rights of Man?