The diagrams were the detailed, precise illustrations of a generation of medical texts before digital imaging, hand-drawn with the specific quality of scientific illustration that was also a kind of art, the structures of the body rendered in ink with both accuracy and a certain beauty that was not intended and existed anyway.
I sat in the chair nearest the window and I read.
Not because I needed to. Not because it was relevant to anything that was happening today or tomorrow or in the immediate future of my life which was full of things that were not medical textbooks. Because it was mine, the reading of it, because the knowledge that lived in these pages was knowledge I had been building toward and had been taken away from and that existed in me still, in the two years of lectures and
