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The body in front of me was partially covered, but it was obvious that it had been mutilated. Some bits actually looked like textbook dissections, showing in detail the routes of main nerves and arteries, muscle insertions and how various organs lay in relation to one another. Our cadaver had been with us for two and a half terms now, and was regarded as a familiar companion. She had given us many hours of study as my group of eight students took it in turns to dissect, whilst others read out instructions from a well-thumbed softback copy of Zuckermann, our anatomy bible. We knew her intimately by now and respected her greatly.
I don’t know how many people are inspired to donate their bodies to medical science after death. It must take a great deal of forethought and may possibly be a reflection of gratitude. I remember one afternoon trying to locate our subject’s uterus and delving into her pelvic cavity, only to discover it was a futile exercise, as she had had it removed in her lifetime. I never thought of that before. For some reason, I expected a perfect body, with everything intact, as it should be. After all, we were working to a textbook and we had no knowledge of her medical history.
On another occasion, we cut right down onto the femoral head, intent on examining the hip joint, only to hit metal. The woman had had a hip replacement, and I remember one of the boys in my group removing it from the bone and taking it home as a memento. It was smooth, shiny and cool to the touch – unlike the other hip, which showed the wear and tear of years of weight bearing and movement. I am sure it was against any of the rules, but nobody said anything. In fact, a rumour going round at the time, whether fact or fiction, concerned a male student in the year above who had reportedly removed a leg from the dissection room, dressed it and taken it home on the tube train. Everyone said it was true, and that he was suspended, but I remain sceptical.
‘For those of you who want to help, you can stay behind. The others can leave after you’ve cleared your tables,’ the anatomy instructor concluded as we approached the end of another Zuckermann chapter.
After the weekend, we were to begin studying the head – and that meant disposing of the rest of the body. But in order to do so, it meant not only decapitation but sawing right down the middle of the head. For me it was a line too far; it was not something I wished to be involved in or to witness. Very few of us stayed.
When we returned the following Monday, our dissection table looked unusually empty. At the end of each was a large jar, and in it we found our woman’s head, split down the middle vertically – a sagittal split – so that we could see her brain tissue and airways and gullet. It looked like a specimen rather than a person, and I was glad of it. We spent the following weeks prodding and poking, examining and reading and ultimately memorizing all we could about the anatomy of the head.
The systematic dissection of human cadavers for medical study dates back to 200 BC, but medical students do not spend much time around a dissection table in the anatomy theatre any longer. These days it is more usual for them to have expertly produced ‘landscaped specimens’ already prepared, supplemented by computer models, digital images and videotapes of almost anything. I remember how impressed I was by one of our anatomy tutors who was able to draw out for us the human chest cavity, building it layer upon layer, so we were able to appreciate a three-dimensional perspective of how organs, blood vessels and muscles related to one another. I have since seen a similar approach in textbooks, with layered acetate sheets as pages.
For us, the dissection room was a large part of our first year at medical school; an initiation and a rite of passage. We spent much of our time in sterile environments overwhelmed by the smell of formalin. It got into everything; our belongings, our clothing, under our fingernails and into our hair. We were still smelling of it when we went to the canteen for lunch, already having removed our white lab coats and washing our hands.
That memorable first scalpel incision into the back we all had to make on the first day as medical students is still etched in my mind. I remember vividly the feel of the blade in my hand and the different resistance as the scalpel went through the skin (rather rubbery), into the subcutaneous tissue and hitting muscle.
“We were introduced to our own cadaver today,” I said to a friend that night from a public telephone box at the end of my road when I returned to my bedsit a few stops along the District Line.
“I suppose that was your first dead body,” she replied, rather sympathetically, as if knowing it must have been a tough day for all sorts of reasons. It wasn’t – but I didn’t tell her that.