To the Editor:

I very much enjoyed Allegra Goodman’s story, “The Art Biz” [September]. As a dermatologist, I especially appreciated the artful way Miss Goodman strewed cutaneous images through the story. She did a marvelous job of using the skin and its appendages in the metaphorical way people understand them.

The pores, for instance, stand not for little cul-de-sacs holding hair follicles and oil glands, but, rather, represent conduits between the inner milieu and the outer realm. Through them noxious badness may issue out (such as by massage), and both toxic badness or healing balm may seep in (as when soothing water passes through en route to bathe sore muscles it can only reach through the magic of metaphor).

Of course, it depends what is in the water. One of Miss Goodman’s literary forebears, the 18th-century novelist and physician Tobias Smollett, had this to say in Humphry Clinker:

Went to king’s bath to clear strainer of skin for benefit of free perspiration. Child with scrofulous ulcers in bath. Thought makes my blood run cold. We know not what sores may be running into the water while we bathe, and what sort of matter we may thus imbibe; the king’s evil, the scurvy, the cancer, and the pox, and no doubt the heat, will render the virus the more volatile and penetrating. To purify myself from all such contamination, I went to the Duke of Kingston’s private bath. . . . After all, if the intention is no more than to wash the skin, I am convinced that simple element is more effectual than any water impregnated with salt and iron, which, being astringent, will certainly contract the pores, and leave a kind of crust upon the surface of the body. But I am now as much afraid of drinking as of bathing, for, after a long conversation with the doctor about the construction of the pump, and the cistern, it is very far from being clear to me, that the patients in the Pump-room don’t swallow the scourings of the bathers. I can’t help suspecting that there is, or may be, some regurgitation from the bath into the cistern of the pump. In that case, what a delicate beverage is every day quaffed by the drinkers, medicated with the sweat, and dirt, and dandruff, and the abominable discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies, parboiling in the kettle below.

If you’re not careful, you never know what can get under your skin.

Likewise, people construe sebaceous cysts as little sacs of badness, the sense I assume Miss Goodman intended by choosing this homely lesion (in her story, Henry goes to a dermatologist to have a cyst looked at, and the doctor says he will have to freeze it off). With-in a fibrous capsule, cysts hold white, puslike material with a characteristic and obnoxious smell. As such, they suit Miss Goodman’s metaphoric purpose quite well. Sebaceous (actually “epidermoid”) cysts live under the epidermis, though. To the best of my knowledge, liquid nitrogen will not get rid of them.

It is not enough to freeze badness out. You have to cut

Avi Rockoff, M.D.
Brookline, Massachusetts

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Allegra Goodman writes:

I will make sure that Henry gets that cyst removed surgically, since Avi Rockoff says that the liquid nitrogen won’t do the trick. Of course, Henry finds any kind of invasive procedure absolutely horrifying. However, if this is Dr. Rockoff’s medical advice I, as Henry’s creator, will make sure that he follows it.

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Correction

In Joseph P. Viteritti’s article, “The Last Freedom” [November], three Supreme Court cases were incorrectly cited. The correct citations are: Lemon v. Kurtzman, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, and Waltz v. Tax Commission. We regret the error.—ED.