![\"Richard](\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/site\/blog\/icons\/bmjh7648e.jpg\")
Paul Val\u00e9ry, the French poet and polymath, believed that we all have three bodies and suffer because we cannot bring them together. The best doctors, I suggest, pay attention to all three bodies, but most doctors, I fear, restrict themselves to one of the three.<\/p>\n
The first body, argued Val\u00e9ry, is the one we live in, the one that is us. For us all, \u201cit is the most important object in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
The second body is the one seen by the world, the fa\u00e7ade. It is, said Val\u00e9ry, \u201cthe body which has form and is appreciated in the arts, the body on which materials, ornaments, armour sit, which love wants or wants to see, and yearns to touch.\u201d Titian and other great artists painted this body.<\/p>\n
The third body is the hidden machine, the organs we know we have but never see. We know about it \u201conly for having dissected and dismembered it\u2026nothing leads us to suspect a liver or kidney.\u201d This is the body that interests us the least, but it is, of course, the body that is best known to doctors.<\/p>\n
Indeed, most doctors feel uncomfortable with the other two bodies. John Berger in his book The Fortunate Man<\/em> described how the fortunate man, the rural GP, felt uncomfortable doing anything around a patient\u2019s eyes because that\u2019s where we live, behind the eyes. He was coming too close to the first body, a body that is subjective, one that many doctors think lies beyond their territory.<\/p>\n Then the second body carries all sorts of threats for doctors. They mustn\u2019t be appalled by the ugly or attracted to the beautiful. I learnt about Val\u00e9ry\u2019s ideas in Nancy Etcoff\u2019s extremely interesting book Survival of the Prettiest: the Science of Beauty<\/em>. Her argument, which she ably supports, is that \u201cbeauty is a universal part of human experience, and that it provokes pleasure, rivets attention, and impels actions that help ensure the survival of our genes.\u201d Beauty matters. Those that have it do better than those who don\u2019t. \u201cIn the United States,\u201d writes Etcoff, a Faculty Member at Harvard Medical School, \u201cmore money is spent on beauty than on education or social services.\u201d (I\u2019m not sure how she arrives at that statement, but if clothes, jewellery, perfumes, cosmetics, soap, toothpaste, hairdressing, and cosmetic surgery are included it\u2019s believable.)<\/p>\n We want, believes Etcoff, \u201cto be not only works of nature but works of art.\u201d We want our three bodies to be a unified whole, which means a lot of work on the second and hoping that the third doesn\u2019t let us down by some vital organ failing. Doctors are not sympathetic to work on the second body.<\/p>\n Dermatologists don\u2019t believe themselves to be concerned with the second body but the third, doing what they can to cure skin disease, but reluctant to mess with beauty. Cosmetic surgeons may enter the territory of beauty, but the profession gives little respect to those who operate on faces, noses, and breasts to make patients happier with their second bodies, preferring plastic surgeons who battle the ravages of fire and cancer. And do those cosmetic surgeons who try to beautify second bodies give enough consideration to first bodies? I doubt it.<\/p>\n But the best doctors surely deal with whole people, which means not only their minds and social life but also all three bodies\u2014extending beyond the third to connect with the subjectivity of the first and showing a willingness to help as best they can with the second.<\/p>\n