"Surgery of darkness" is the title of this chapter's epigraph. It's a reference to a famous scene in Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice, in which a young doctor is performing a surgical procedure on a patient who has been struck by a truck. The young doctor, however, has no idea what he's doing, and he doesn't even know how to use a scalpel. He's just standing there and doing nothing. The doctor's not even an expert in anatomy, so the young doctor can't figure out how to operate on the patient. He also doesn' t understand why the surgeon didn't learn anatomy from art school, or why the architect from World War Two used anatomy from his studies to perform a surgery on an American soldier with appendicitis. The surgeon's got no idea how to do the surgery, and the patient's condition isn't good enough for him to perform the surgery. So the doctor says he'll do it himself.