A Comment by Seneca

“For this reason I hold that there is nothing of eminence in all such men as these, who never create anything themselves, but always lurk in the shadows of others, playing the role of interpreters, never daring to put once into practice what they have been so long in learning. They have exercised their memories on other men’s materials. But it is one thing to remember, another to know.”

— Seneca (4 BC–AD 65)

I debated whether to place my commentary before or after this passage. Ultimately, I have chosen to conclude with my own reflections, allowing the reader the opportunity to ponder Seneca’s words in isolation before I offer my interpretation.

This excerpt is drawn from Seneca’s Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium—specifically Letter 33, which addresses the futility of learning solely through maxims. In the Roman context, these maxims (sententiae) were pithy, self-contained moral truths intended for rote memorization. While useful for the novice, Seneca argues that a persistent reliance on them prevents the student from ever reaching intellectual maturity.

Upon encountering this letter, I was immediately reminded of my own experiences as a student. I recall instructors who taught strictly from the textbook, possessing little to no independent insight into their subjects. Under such guidance, outdated and erroneous content often persisted; with the benefit of hindsight, these errors now seem glaring. Such teachers acted merely as conduits for "somebody else’s facts," filling the minds of their students with borrowed information rather than cultivated knowledge.

Conversely, I also encountered educators who looked beyond the constraints of the syllabus. They enriched their lessons with personal experience and anecdote, imbuing dry facts with deeper meaning. They did not merely transmit information; they provided new prisms through which to view familiar concepts, transforming the academic into the lived.

In this passage, Seneca offers a critique that remains strikingly relevant to modern education. He speaks to those who teach without interpretation or the desire to provoke original questions. For Seneca, there is a profound difference between being a mere "interpreter"—one who echoes the shadows of others—and being an "author." The former remains a perpetual student, never daring to step out of the secondary literature to claim their own voice or test their learning in the crucible of practice. This failure to lead is often a failure of engagement rather than ability.

That this cycle can be broken is something I have seen in my own practice. I was once tasked with teaching a subject I had never previously studied. By first laboring to make the material meaningful and interesting to myself, I discovered the necessary pathways to make it equally engaging for my students.

Seneca’s Letter 33 is a brief but essential read. Indeed, the entirety of his correspondence with Lucilius offers much to the modern reader concerned with the transition from remembering to knowing.

Femur Fumeur

Those unacquainted with the dissecting room are often struck by its instrumentation. A standard kit is modest enough—scalpels, forceps, and various probes—but one notices that a kit’s volume tends to expand in direct proportion to the time one spends in these environments. While some individuals possess a talent for losing tools, others, like myself, seem to attract them. I hasten to clarify that this is not a matter of larceny; I have never deliberately stolen an instrument, yet I invariably possess more than I began with.

Most of these tools would not be out of place in a modern operating theatre. However, the dissecting room frequently employs an implement seldom seen in surgery: the tenon saw. While orthopedic surgeons certainly use saws for amputations or osteotomies, theirs are specialized instruments—designed to be entirely sterilisable, with smooth surfaces that offer no refuge for organic debris. In the dissecting room, such clinical necessities are absent. Here, the saws are identical to those one would find in a carpenter’s workshop; they are, in every sense, tools for woodwork.

I recall passing a group of students, one afternoon, who were attempting to saw through the left femur of a male cadaver. The cut was positioned just above the mid-thigh, roughly a third of the way down from the hip. Despite their exertions, they were making no progress. When I was called over, the students were visibly baffled; they reported that they had been sawing with such vigor that smoke had begun to rise from the site of the cut.

Taking up the saw myself, it was not the sensation of a blade against bone that I felt. It was that of saw blade against surgical steel. We soon discovered that the individual had undergone a total hip replacement. Upon eventually removing the distal portion of the limb, we exposed the lower extremity of the prosthetic femoral stem.

Two details were particularly striking. First, the metal remained as pristine and reflective as the day it was implanted. Second, despite the formidable density of the alloy, the students’ persistence had left a mark: the tenon saw—a tool designed for timber—had cut a groove some three or four millimeters into the metal.

The students had indeed been trying very hard. One cannot wonder at the smoke.

The Irony of the Science of Life

At the heart of biology lies an irony hiding in plain sight—one that perhaps requires the sensibility of a poet to fully expose. The paradox is this: in biology, the very science of life, we frequently kill the subject of our study in order to understand it. To observe the mechanisms of life, we must often first extinguish the spark itself.

The poet who most famously articulated this tension was William Wordsworth (1770–1850). In his 1798 poem The Tables Turned (the full text of which I append below), he offered a succinct and haunting indictment of the analytical impulse:

'We murder to dissect'

This sentiment is a quintessential expression of the Romantic era—a period in British literature generally dated from 1785 to 1832—which arose, in part, as a reaction against the cold, mechanistic reductionism of the Enlightenment.

This era also produced alternative methodologies, most notably the scientific work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Unlike the Newtonian model, Goethe’s approach to science sought to understand the "wholeness" of living organisms through "delicate empiricism." He argued that one should observe the metamorphosis of plants and the harmony of form while the subject remained vital, rather than relying solely on the post-mortem analysis of its parts.

A remarkably similar perspective appears in the mid-twentieth century within the World Perspectives book series. In the general introduction to the series—an essay included in all 54 volumes—the editor Ruth Nanda Anshen argues that "to subdivide Man is to execute him."

Whether the method is physical dissection or intellectual subdivision, the result remains the same: death. Anshen’s warning was intended to combat the increasing fragmentation of human knowledge. She contended that over-specialization in science and philosophy acts as a too narrow lens that, while magnifying a part, destroys the essence of the whole person.

In our own time, we see a belated recognition of this problem in the rise of Systems Biology. This discipline attempts to move beyond the reductionist "murder" of previous centuries by focusing on the integrated networks and emergent properties of living systems. It suggests that by looking at the interactions rather than just the isolated components, we might finally begin to study life without first having to extinguish it. In our quest for precision, we must ensure we do not lose the very subject we sought to define.

The Tables Turned (1798)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Another CIrculation Figure

 

Another figure depicting the human circulatory system. (Another in what I ought to call the 'same but different' series.) This is from McNaught and Callander's Illustrated Physiology. The more recent editions had different editors and I think that the book is now sadly out of print. This is a great pity. It was one of my favourite books especially for the illustrations - which I used to use as lecture slides.

There were other 'Illustrated's consisting primarily of pages of such figures. It was published originally, I believe, by Churchill Livingstone. One I used to use was Pathology Illustrated. Another (which I did not use) was Gynaecology Illustrated. These also appear to be out of print. I cannot remember any others, although there was once a pocket sized Illustrated Physiology for Nurses.