The same report adds that officials and the institute itself are proclaiming this the first such operation carried out wholly within the United States. Ten others, however, had already been performed for the sake of investigation between Orlando and Luanda in Angola. It was permitted by an exemption granted by the Food and Drug Administration, and, as AdventHealth itself admits, its success does not mean the procedure is to be held safe. There remain, besides, the risks inherent in every such operation, and those that may arise from attacks through the networks or from a broken connection, which are still being weighed. Patel himself says that access to the most specialized care has long depended on where each patient lives, and that this study asks whether telesurgery might one day reduce those barriers. As a philosopher I welcome this, because it inquires and does not boast. Of the ten patients in Luanda who came first, the report says nothing; and that is the question I, as a teacher, would set my pupils before any other. For first within a border is not yet first in the world.

Let us begin, as geometers do, with definitions. Art, which the Greeks call technē, is the true reasoned method of making a thing, and it resides in the mind of the maker; the hand is its instrument, and the scalpel the instrument of an instrument. Touch is a sense, by which the maker learns about his material. Whoever says that art has been separated from touch, then, confuses two things: the reason that works and the sense that reports. This machine carries the reports of the senses across distance, the eyes through images, the hand through imitated motions; reason it cannot carry, because reason was never absent. It stayed in the surgeon's head in Orlando.

Let the demonstration proceed by steps. First: distance belongs to quantity, and knowledge is not diminished by it. Eratosthenes did not walk around the earth; he compared the shadow at Syene with the shadow at Alexandria and grasped the circumference of the globe with his mind. Second: the farther an instrument extends the hand, the more faithful it must be. Archimedes, defending Syracuse, is said to have lifted enemy ships from the walls with his engines; yet those engines did not move of themselves. Men stood at the ropes, and the old man's mind acted through their hands. So here too a thread lies between the mind in Orlando and the body in Minneola, and the thread, like every chain, is as strong as its weakest link. Third: the patient's body is a particular thing, the art a universal one; the universal can be sent across distance, but the particular demands care that is present. That is why the surgeon at the bedside, whose name the report does not even give, is part of the demonstration itself.

I conclude, therefore. The mind has not been separated from the flesh for the first time today; it never touched it. Even when the surgeon's hand moved within the wound, the soul acted through the hand as through an instrument, and the senses brought it their reports. The machine carries the report farther; it does not change the nature of the thing. The danger, then, is not that art may transcend itself, but that men may come to believe the art lies in the machine, which only returns motions. If anyone ever thinks a surgeon unnecessary because the machine cuts, he will be taking the shadow of a circle for the circle.

The remedy is simple and old. Let a skilled physician always stand at the bedside, ready to take up the scalpel himself should the thread break. Let the thread be doubled, like an aqueduct with twin channels. Let the outcomes of all the patients, in Luanda and in Minneola alike, be published openly, so that knowledge judges what is safe and rumour holds its tongue. I admire the work, my hearers, and I confess our ancestors could not have dreamed of such a thing; but wonder is the beginning of philosophy. What has not yet been measured has not yet been proved.