The Young Turks

As Karyn spoke, Frist came down the stairs. "This is really who you are," she said, looking up at him. She first met Frist in the emergency room, where he treated her for a sprained wrist. "I fell in love with him in his scrub suit, with blood splattered on his clogs.

The man is a freak:

One Saturday night, Karyn recalled, "we were supposed to go to a movie. He walked out in his scrubs." Instead of taking Karyn to the theater, Frist brought her to the operating room. "To see the human body alive -- without a heart in it."

It gets better:

"Well, your first patient was a dog," Karyn said. In medical school, Frist cut out a dog's heart and held it in his palm. It continued to beat for a slippery minute.

"Watching it beat, the beauty of it," Frist recalled. "I decided I would spend my life centered around the heart."

Remember this is the guy who admitted he killed cats he adopted in medical school to do experiments on them. He admitted in his own autobiography and called it "heinous" in hindsight.

Now he is having his moments with gorillas:

Frist listened to the heart; the gorilla's lub-dub sounded human. "When you're this close, you feel this kind of oneness with them," Frist said. The stink of ape sweat and gorilla testosterone soaked his hair and clothes. "Gorillas, people, men. You look at the people here, a symphonic flow of people pitching in. It's the oneness of humanity."

This is the article's final spooky paragraph:

At 9:30 a.m., Frist opened the Senate, gripping the corners of the lectern, as he had the operating table. Across the city, rolling in a bed of hay, Kuja opened his eyes and grunted. The gorilla kept touching his tongue to his tooth. Something had changed inside of the beast while he slept. Frist smiled and spoke unremarkably from the lectern, reeking of silverback testosterone.

Reeking of silverback testosterone? Did he give the gorilla a happy ending? Something had changed inside the beast, indeed.

Read the rest of the article, it is soaked with blood and fawning references to Frist as a "Superman" who might cure AIDS or cancer. Unbelieveable. It reads like some sort of weird propaganda literature, where you're not sure you're supposed to like him or fear him. Finally, here are some pictures of Frist actually doing the surgery on the gorilla. This story only gets funnier. In the pictures I can almsot smell the ape sweat and silverback testosterone on him.