No Self in the Guts

One night Chu got tipsy and went to bed first, leaving the Judge drinking by himself. In his drunken sleep he seemed to feel a pain in his stomach, and waking up he saw that the Judge, who was standing by the side of the bed, had opened him, and was carefully arranging his inside.

“What harm have I done you,” cried Chu, “that you should thus seek to destroy me?”

“Don’t be afraid,” replied the Judge, laughing; “I am only providing you with a more intelligent heart.”

He then quietly put back Chu’s viscera, and closed up the opening, securing it with a bandage tied tightly round his waist. There was no blood on the bed, and all Chu felt was a slight numbness in his inside.

From "Judge Lu" by Pu Songling, translated by Herbert Giles (read it at GoogleBooks). Strange medical conditions and medical practices are a major theme in Pu Songling's stories of the fantastic; a recent post on by an LJ friend on their medical conditions reminded me once again of this. I think I might actually use "Judge Lu" in my class next fall, because it can start a dialogue about where the "self" resides -- is it in the body, and if so what region of the body. This guy gets a new heart and so becomes smarter, and later on Judge Lu helps him get a new head for his wife. But unlike in, say, The Eye, neither husband nor wife get any of the "self"-baggage that their new body parts might have brought from their old owners. This story and this idea is apparently still active enough to deserve mention in a 2006 article in a Chinese technology magazine that debunked the idea that someday we will have "head transplants." (I found a couple of Chinese television versions of the story as well; this one looks good.)