"Good Lord! You sliced that man open from his neck to his belly! You've cut out his heart! You're sucking out his blood, you ghoul!" These are just some of the things you might say if you stumbled on a surgeon conducting a heart transplant.

Of course, you wouldn't actually say it because you'd see the men and women in their gowns and masks, along with all the medical doodads including "the machine that goes 'ping'" — as they say in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

But the important thing to keep in mind is that in a major operation — on a person or a nation — the patient is the most vulnerable, and looks the most horrible, halfway into the procedure, not at the beginning or the end. And if, in your horror, you screamed, "Stop what you're doing right now!" you'd be saying you want the patient to die.

--National Review Online