Home 
Let’s face it; some people are better kissers than others. For many, kissing is reduced to a physical act and nothing more. For others, kissing allows them to communicate their passion and love for one another.
Dr. Richard Selzer once witnessed a kiss that left as big of an impact on him as it did the one who received it.
Richard Selzer spent the brunt of his medical career operating as a surgeon. His talent with a scalpel allowed him to serve as a professor of surgery at Yale where he did so with great distinction. But Dr. Selzer couldn’t save everyone, and even those he did save often bore scars that took a long time to heal…if they healed at all.
In his book Mortal Lessons, Dr. Selzer recounts a kiss he witnessed between a husband and his wife on whom he’d just operated.
I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, somewhat clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, had been severed. She will be this way from now on.
I had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.
Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, the moment is a private one.
“Who are they?” I ask myself? He and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at each other so generously, so lovingly. The young woman speaks.
“Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “It will. It is because the nerve was cut.” She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles.
“I like it,” he says, “It’s kind of cute.”
All at once I know who he is. I understand and I lower my gaze. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.
A kiss that communicates that much commitment qualifies as a great one.
Resource’s Origin:
Mortal Lessons: Notes On the Art of Surgery by Richard Selzer. Simon & Schuster, 1976, Pages 45-46.
Topics Illustrated Include:
Bad News
Beauty
Commitment
Devotion
Doctor
Health
Husband
Kissing
Love
Loyalty
Surgery
Wife
(Resource cataloged by David R Smith)
