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Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

Dr. George Bartley

Dear Readers,

Our nation's capital was built to impress and inspire, with its imposing buildings and classical monuments, its grand spaces and geometric designs. But what I most wanted to see on a recent trip to Washington, D.C., was a 14th century painting smaller than a 5 x 7-inch index card: Saint George and the Dragon by the Flemish master Rogier van der Weyden.

My eagerness resulted from reading about the painting in a book that explores the human capacity for wonder and amazement.* The author explained how microscopic features in this tiny but exquisite work were essentially undiscovered until the mid-1990s, when the National Gallery of Art began scanning its paintings into computer files and had to magnify the images significantly to capture detail that previously had gone unrecognized. For example, in the background of Saint George and the Dragon, there is a walled city in which a water jug allegedly sits on a windowsill. I say "allegedly" because I could not see the jug with my naked eye, even though I was leaning so close to the painting that one of the museum guards warned me to step back!

No doubt there are many such examples of miniature virtuosity in late medieval art, but what is delightful about this particular work is an inscription in Latin on the back of the painting that translates: "Look and ponder. One discovers things from art." A National Gallery staff member was quoted in agreement: "That detail was there all along, just waiting to be discovered."

Similarly, there is much to be discovered in the human body, if we "look and ponder." Week after week, medical journals chronicle steady progress in our understanding of how the body functions, both in health and disease. Often, as with the van der Weyden painting, research focuses on smaller and smaller detail. That is, we learn more about how cells work, or about the genes within cells, or about the proteins that the genes encode, or about the metabolic products of those proteins. Occasionally, however, something on a "macro" level will be revealed, such as the identification about 10 years ago of a previously overlooked muscle in the human face. If there's one branch of medicine that ought to be pretty much fully understood by now, it would be gross anatomy. Yet, here was a" new" muscle. Clearly, it was there all along, just waiting to be discovered.

It is exciting to imagine what is yet to be learned about the body, the amazing work of art that we in medicine are privileged to study. It is also humbling, however, considering how much we still do not know. We are "fearfully and wonderfully made," as the Psalmist proclaimed, but the body does not disclose its secrets readily.

That's where you come in: when you participate in clinical research studies; when you allow medical trainees to care for you under the supervision of a staff physician; when you honor Mayo Clinic through philanthropy; when you support medical research and education with your tax dollars.

Medical discovery is a perpetual journey. As Dr. Charles H. Mayo put it: "Once you start studying medicine, you never get through with it." Thanks for traveling with us.

Sincerely,

George B. Bartley, M.D.
Chair, Board of Governors

*"Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder" by Lawrence Weschler.