I had spent years in systems that spoke of energy centres. He took the vocabulary apart in front of me.

He was not dismissing the territory. He was refusing the map. What he wanted, he said, was to strip those systems of their arbitrariness: through science on one side and the microscope on the other.

Then he did it. Who could doubt, he asked, that the generative urge arises in the region of the sex glands? Or that near the heart, at the thymus, the forces are at work that give beings their feelings: love among them, and jealousy, and anger? For every gland producing hormones toward some activity, there is a corresponding hearth where that activity objectively begins.

So examine the centres of vital energy, he said, not through the prism of Eastern and esoteric philosophy, but through the plain scientific placement of what each gland does. Then their usefulness becomes comfortable and honest.

He was a deep knower of medicine. He would not let the body be replaced by a diagram.