“I believe I have already set down in my notes that love greatly resembles an application of torture or a surgical operation. But this idea can be developed, and in the most ironic manner. For even when two lovers love passionately and are full of mutual desire, one of the two will always be cooler or less self-abandoned than the other. He or she is the surgeon or executioner; the other, the patient or victim.” —Baudelaire

Jane Sand, a college professor with a young daughter, falls into a Baudelairean darkness when circumstances bring her into contact with the medical establishment. Charged with eroticism and obscured by comedy, her relationship with a witty, urbane surgeon degenerates into something half-holocaust half-rapture. Eventually, a botched operation silences the woman forever, whereas the voices of age and inanity, medical jargon and human suffering, persist. A dreamlike journey into the unspoken and unspeakable erotics of medicine.