Regeneration by Pat Barker Page B

Prior, and overcrowding and the endless permutations of people sharing that were madenecessary by nightmares, sleep-walking, the need of some patients for night-lights and others for absolute darkness.
    His irritation, groping for an object, fastened on Sassoon. Sassoon made no secret of his belief that anybody who supported the continuation of the war must be actuated by selfish motives, and yet if Rivers had allowed such motives to dominate, he’d have wanted the war to end tonight. Let the next generation cope with the unresolved problem of German militarism, just get me back to Cambridge and research. He flicked through the journal, but he was too tired to concentrate, and, after a few minutes, he switched off the light.
    Shortly before dawn he woke. Still dazed from sleep, he put his hand to his left arm, expecting to feel blood. The dry cloth of his pyjama sleeve told him he’d been dreaming. He switched on the lamp and lay for a while, recollecting the details of the dream, then picked up a notepad and pencil from his bedside table and began to write.
I was in my room at St John’s, sitting at the table in front of the book case. Head was beside me, his left sleeve rolled up, and his eyes closed. The sleeve was rolled up well above his elbow, so that the full length of the incision was revealed. The scar was purple. The tablecloth was spread with various items of equipment: jugs of water, wisps of cotton wool, bristle brushes, compasses, ice cubes, pins.
My task was to map the area of hypersensitivity to pain on Head’s forearm. He sat with his eyes closed and his face turned slightly away. Every time I pricked him he cried out and tried to pull his arm away. I was distressed by this and didn’t want to go on, but I knew I had to. Head kept on crying out.
The dream changed and I was drawing a map of the protopathic area directly on to his skin. The pen was as painful as the needle had been. Head opened his eyes and said something I didn’t catch. It sounded like, ‘Why don’t you try it?’ He was holding an object out towards me. I looked down to see what it was, and saw that my own left arm was bare, though I couldn’t recall rolling up my sleeve.
The object in Head’s hand was a scalpel. I began to ask him to repeat what he’d said, but before I could get the words out, he’d leant forward and brought the scalpel down my arm, in the region of the elbow. The incision, although about six inches long, was so fine that at first there was no blood. After a second, small beads of blood began to appear, and at that point I woke up.
    Rivers started to analyse the dream. The manifest content didn’t take long. Except for the cutting of his arm, the dream was an unusually accurate reproduction of events that had actually occurred.
    Henry Head had been working for some time on the regeneration of nerves after accidental injury, using as his subjects patients in the public wards of London hospitals, before concluding that, if any further progress was to be made, more rigorously controlled tests would have to be done. Rivers had pointed out that these would have to be carried out on a subject who was himself a trained observer, since an extremely high degree of critical awareness would be needed to exclude preconceptions. Head had volunteered himself as the subject of the proposed experiment, and Rivers had assisted at the operation in which Head’s radial nerve had been severed and sutured. Then, together, over a period of five years, they had charted the progress of regeneration.
    During the early stage of recovery, when the primitive, protopathic sensibility had been restored, but not yet the finely discriminating epicritic sensibility, many of the experiments had been extremely painful. Protopathic sensibility seemed to have an ‘all or nothing’ quality. The threshold of sensation was high, but, once crossed, the sensations were both abnormally widely diffused and – to use Head’s own word –