parenchyma

While cramming for my board exams, I found myself tucking away medical terms like crackers. A big part of doing well on these exams has to do with associations; read nitroblue tetrazolium and think chronic granulomatous disease. At one point I learned the details of what the former and latter actually mean. These days I retain a general sense, but a lot of the finer points that would help form a concrete image are lost in the process of remembering the words. Things have become more and more familiar to me, but I don't know them more deeply.

Despite learning so much, the time has been so compact that I can still remember what it was like in the beginning. I distinctly remember feeling as overwhelmed as I still do, but also completely bewildered (as opposed to 89% so, currently). I remember sitting in front of the computer with my classmate, going through learning exercises on our school website. I remember looking at pictures of the lungs, and looking at each other, and wondering, "What's parenchyma?"

Wikipedia told us that parenchyma is the "bulk of a substance." This wasn't quite clear to us. I was used to science depicting arrows to things and giving them names, names that you could then translate into something you could point to. Over the past few years, we've learned that learning science isn't so much about precision as much as it is generalities for the details we don't know yet or can't know. Over the same past few years, the term parenchyma has been thrown around so often in relation to so many organs that we feel we know it. We know it not by memorized definition but by sense and familiarity. We can't point it out but we can nod when we hear the word. I feel this way about a lot of things in science and medicine, but parenchyma specifically crossed my mind a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday a friend of mine brought it up as an example of something he still doesn't really understand.

It's not that I think our knowledge is hollow. Every so often when I study, I'm stopped by the sudden rediscovery of how smart people can be. Sometimes words are gloss-overs, but often they are substantial representations of observation and logic. But I do feel we know less of the bulk of substances than we like to admit. After all, it's supposed to be a catch-all term for the essence of something, and we throw it around like it's something we can hold, and we dismiss the fact that we don't have precise means to define it. But if it's kind of the essence of the thing, shouldn't we take more care with that? Shouldn't we want to express it more clearly, know it better? At the least, give credit to its depth by confessing that our hands are too slippery and clumsy for it?

Writing is important to me for being a way to give more substance to our vague sense of substance. Even though it doesn't give the step by step explanation that we seek and sometimes miss from science, it acknowledges the fact that it can't. The bulk of a substance might be heavy, but weight can make things more elusive, and it seems right that this is so. For all the parts of life we know and handle, we rarely absorb it as a whole. I don't think it's meant to be fully known (or maybe it's just not possible), but I do think we're meant to seek it out (or maybe we just want to).