Balls and Walnuts
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Thirteen scenes from Gross Anatomy
Nothing says “medical school” like Gross Anatomy. Think about it: anyone can study microbiology, histology, or pathology. But how many people get to cut up dead bodies? How many people would want to?
Maybe in the future, cadaver dissection will be replaced by in computero practical exercises, but I doubt it. A big part of training is learning to violate taboos — getting close to people, asking them the most intimate of questions, touching them in ways even their spouses wouldn’t touch them, and hurting them. None of this comes naturally; all of it must be learned. Or, rather, unlearned. It’s all about breaking down internal barriers.
And that’s why Gross Anatomy will always play a role in medical education.
Follow me below the fold for thirteen memories. Sorry, no more pictures on this one; I doubt I would find anything palatable for mass consumption.
1. The tour. During our orientation week, we were given a tour of the anatomy lab, a large warehouse of a building used for no other purpose. (One whiff of the place would tell you why. More, below, on the smell.) I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a thrill at this first trespass into the forbidden. I knew I was venturing into a new world, and I think I also knew I was leaving something behind forever.
There’s a good deal of surrealism to these memories. Did I dream, or did I really see, a winch used for hauling bodies out of an enormous bath of formalin? And were the bodies really stacked like cord wood? We only saw the storage room once, so the memory has faded and become unreal.
2. The smell. If you’ve never smelled formaldehyde or formalin, it’s indescribable. Not pleasant, that’s for sure. It permeates your hair, your skin, your clothing.
We all bought auto mechanic-style coveralls for anatomy lab, but it didn’t help. We kept special shoes, socks, and underwear, too, and I suspect all of us destroyed everything once we were done with that class. Gray, stringy bits of debris clung to the clothing — would you really want that to go through your washing machine? So, no, I doubt many of us laundered our clothes. The smell was appalling.
And the weirdest thing about it was, ten minutes into class, you wouldn’t even notice anymore.
3. The feel. Anatomy lab stimulates all five senses, though. (You’d better believe you can taste the formalin.) The things which stick with me the most: the coldness and greasiness of dead flesh; the toughness of skin.
4. The Achilles’ heel. Everyone has their own Achilles’ heel — an area of the body which, when they are compelled to dissect it, unnerves them more than anything else. For me, the hand and eye were particularly bothersome. Others had problems with the face, still others, the genitalia.
That’s why we began on the back. A prone cadaver has no face, no identity. For a while, you can fool yourself into forgetting the body’s humanity, but that dodge never lasts. You have to flip the body over eventually.
5. Getting used to it. Achilles’ heels aside, most of us became accustomed to the strangeness of cadaver dissection within the first one or two sessions. And that’s the point, after all: if you can do this, it’s that much easier to poke at LIVE bodies.
You know you’re over the hump when you can eat your lunch while in the lab. You really know you’re over the hump when you eat your lunch and don’t even joke about it anymore. Which reminds me . . .
6. The humor. All the defense mechanisms come in to play. I’m proud to report that none of us got into trouble by stealing body parts and using them as Halloween gags. We were good boys and girls, but that didn’t stop us from cutting up in class.
Ew. Sorry.
Best joke: one of our prosectors was busy doing a pelvic dissection on a female cadaver. He stood between her legs, kind of hunched over. Someone took a photo of it. I think that photo got passed around so much we wore it down to dust.
7. The rounds. When we finally flipped our bodies over, curiosity overwhelmed us. We made the rounds — quite literally, in a grim, prescient echo of something we would do to living beings many months hence. But we weren’t interested in the health of our charges.
We wanted to look at their faces.
8. Numbness. After a while, you can’t feel your fingertips any longer. (Even wearing gloves, the formalin seems to seep through.) Your sense of smell goes to hell, too. If you’re too inundated with formalin, you feel cotton-wrapped, a living cocoon.
The feelings come back after a while, but it’s disturbing while it lasts.
9. The book. We each had a dissection manual which we used in class. Unlike our surgical instruments, which we could clean, the manuals soon became filthy with human grease, formalin, and unidentified bits. Those unidentified bits were everywhere. We tried to clean up after ourselves; we really did. But then we’d open our books and stuff would fall out.
To my knowledge, no one took trophies.
10. Dr. Bustos. He was our favorite anatomy lecturer, a no-nonsense army doc who kept us in line and managed to make a fairly dull topic interesting. I remember him lecturing to us on the sphincter ani. Had he come up with this, or was he reading from another source? I don’t know. Here it is to the best of my recollection: “The wondrous sphincter ani! Anatomists wax lyrical over the human hand — a miracle of engineering! But put a mixture of gas, liquid, and solid into the human hand, and ask it to retain the liquid and solid, permitting the gas alone to escape. It’s not going to happen.”
11. The prosectors. We were visitors in their world, here for, what? Nine months? Yet they lived here, cutting away, doing beautiful dissections so that we could see what anatomy was supposed to look like, unlike our ham-handed manglings.
What an unspeakably awful job . . . but they seemed happy enough.
12. Testing. We had both written and practical tests. Wander around the room, pencil and bubble-sheet in hand, look at the pins, read the question:
What nerve innervates this muscle?
What muscle abducts this bone?
And so forth.
I think I did okay. Stanford was pass/fail/honors, and very few folks were ever given honors. I passed everything, but who knows what kind of letter grades I would have had? It made for a pleasant learning experience, though. We all liked one another. No cutthroats in our class, except in the most literal sense of the word.
And I’ve saved the most gruesome memory for last . . .
13. The head table. Don’t ask me how we ended up with a surfeit of heads. Maybe we received a few heads donated separately. In any case, we had a whole table devoted to disembodied heads. There was a cadaver on that table, too; its parted legs made a good barrier for the pile of heads.
One of the heads had to be a good 30-40% larger than the others. He looked just like Boris Karloff.
I’ll try to do the linky lurve tonight, folks. If this afternoon is anything like this morning, though, I won’t be checking back for a few hours.
Why did I check here just before going to bed? I’m not sure if it’ll be better or worse that there won’t be a warm body next to me (Carl’s in Texas–see my TT). If I have nightmares, Doug, I’m blaming you.
I know you said you’d never write a book about being a doc, but geez, it would be a good one. This was vivid & poignant.
I thought I’d move around today and check out some different TT’s. Your is different, but very interesting. I would have never made it through that class. It takes a special person to be able to go into medicine. Just looking at your sidebar that says “wax, boogers and phlegm” makes me cringe. As a mom, I get to see a lot of that too. But I love the people I get to wipe it off of. Happy Thursday!
i agree with darla. you should.
and i got a thirteen up too. its kinda boring, but whatever, i did it!
i know i could never be a doctor, because sophomore year dissecting a WORM made me want to puke, and i had to do the frog dissection on the computer and have my back to the people doing the real ones so i wouldnt disgrace myself. bleehh…
Really, you should write a book about being a doc. I’d buy it.
I dunno about anatomy – I won’t do the viewing at an open casket funeral because it seems too macabre to me. Maybe it would be easier if it was someone I didn’t know.
Book, book! It could be like Oliver Sacks, but with ear wax!
All very interesting, Dr. D. I’ve been pondering veterinary medicine as one of my possible future careers, and it’s so hard to really know how I would react to dissections or surgeries without actually being there, you know?
That said, I don’t think I could do it with humans. I was interested in being a doctor when I was young until I saw Coma… I think there’s a scene where Genevieve Bujold gets caught in a room full of hanging bodies that scarred me for life…
I didn’t do a Thirteen, but the Nearly Naked Challenge has been updated!
Oh, and somebody gave a smartass reply to your questions regarding a vulva.
I was so excited I forgot to comment: eww. I knew there was a reason I could never have been a physician.
#6…a definite ew!
I agree…it takes a special person to go through this to become a doctor…an interesting Thursday 13!
Thanks, folks. I’ve had just the vehicle for a medical novel, too, but (as you know) I want to FINISH something first, okay?
I appreciate the warm thoughts.
People’s Market is this cool co-op where they sell all sorts of healthy goodies like granola and organic stuff and juice. its amazing.
🙂
Although I went into commerce, which offers no dead bodies at all, I would have loved to take a class in Gross Anatomy. A friend of mine went into physio and got a cadaver, and I was sooo jealous. I was the only girl in high school who liked the fetal pig lab.
Yes, I’m twisted.
Like SexKitten, I loved the fetal pig dissection. The better one was in college though, the dual Pigeon – Guinea Pig dissection lab. No formalin.
No, these were warm, freshly pithed specimens. The pigeon was really interesting (our professor insisted that dissecting non-preserved aves was easier). But there wasn’t much to do on the pigeon dissection, so she added in the guinea pig for the last hour of the lab.
Unbeknownst to us prior to attending the lab, these were also freshly pithed. It was warm, and limp, and smelled, well, just like a guinea pig.
I had been so used to the formalin, and had come to expect that sensory barrier during dissections. But this was a REAL guinea pig. Whose heart was fresh and livery red, not pale pink like the formalin cat from the week before.
All in all a very weird experience. But very memorable. I always felt lucky that I experienced that with her. Professors aren’t allowed to pith without getting a release from the students now, so really, they don’t much bother for undergrads.
The table of heads would have freaked me out a little.
If I give you a paypal payment (along the lines of Dean and Kris’s challenge)would you write the damn book?
shaina: thanks for clearing that up!
SxK: yes, you are, but twisted up just right.
Suisan: I haven’t even touched on my experiences with FRESH, um, tissues. Not warm; more on the par of day-old bread. You’re right — the gruesomeness factor is amplified tenfold.
Kate: when my romance is done and on its way to becoming published, THEN I’ll start it, okay?
Here’s the idea. I’ve alluded to this before, but I doubt many of you will remember. I would take the characters from my story “The Mechanic” (over under “Pages” on the left sidebar) and flash forward a few years. The narrator is in med school now, and his friend reenters his life. I think it would make for some interesting alchemy.
OK, on the whole “squick me out factor”, I wrote a piece on my blog about how uncomfortable ultrasound pictures of fetuses make me feel. Just me. And I had an explanation of why the pictures gave me an emotional reaction: anti-abortion protests.
So a Pro-Life blogger first commented *anonymously* on my blog asking if I was “post-abortive” and then linked to me. I’m waiting for the shit-storm of pro-lifers to descend upon my blog.
I guess I’ll have to stop writing about what squicks me out and start writing more about autocunnilingus. Because I can DEAL with those readers on my blog. The other readers squick me out.
I did a lot of animal dissection in HS–took advanced bio. But have avoided humans thus far. Although I love anatomy, I had a hard time just watching a Gross Anatomy video in massage therapy school. You could tell the cadavers were little old men with wasted muscles. It was so sad.
As for the pigeon Suisan mentioned. In Bio we got to pick our animals and I selected the pigeon. A preserved pigeon. HUGE mistake. Pigeons really smell bad. Really bad. So bad our teacher didn’t say anything when we faked the dissection and got rid of the bird as fast as we could. Definitely do a fresh pigeon, not as gross.
And a quick vignette. My lab partner chose a cat for her animal. We had to skin it. I like cats. I gagged the whole time. Little bits of hair would float into our faces, in our mouths along with the smell of formeldahyde (sp?). My lab partner kept the skin. Said she was going to cure it and keep it on her bed when she went to college.
I remember looking at her and saying “Good luck getting anyone else into your bed with that on your pillow.”
She was a disturbing person who enjoyed the butchery of dissection just a little too much. I wonder what happened to her.
M