For years and years, since I was a little girl, what I really wanted was to be an architect. Specifically, what I wanted was to renovate and restore old houses, to find crumbling unloved buildings and patch them up. Oak floorboards, high ceilings, polished staircases, duck egg blue walls; I wanted to play with windows and light. I wanted to clear out the tangled gardens and strip back the plaster to the original bricks, sand down doors and warm the house back up. So when I was eighteen, I applied to study architecture at university. That was the year the bottom fell out of the economy of my country, taking the construction industry with it. Thus, that sunny September, I found myself in medical school.
So it’s evident that I wasn’t One Of Those People who Just Always Knew that they wanted to be doctors. Those people seemed to be entirely focused on medicine; they had known for years that they would end up here. They were diligent, caring, intelligent, dedicated, and it seemed to me that they were everywhere.
In the first week at medical school, everyone feels pretty pleased with themselves for getting in, so they like to throw you in at the deep end: the Dissecting Room. When I was in first year, this was housed in a Victorian Gothic Revival building, built in the mid-nineteenth century and somewhat resembling a small church. Except for, you know, the corpses in various states of dismemberment on metal slabs.
The building had to be kept cold, for obvious reasons, and it was rumoured that after dissection sessions the bodies were stored in the basement in tanks of formaldehyde. At the back of the room was a spiral staircase, leading downwards to the alleged storage facilities. Sometimes in idle moments I liked to imagine the staff lifting the cadavers stiffly down the little stairs to their tanks, where they would rest for the night in the fashion of Dracula.
The first thing I noticed about the dissection room was, of course, the smell. Hours later, when I went home and put away my coat (this was at the very start, when I would put away my coat carefully, even ironing it now and then), the smell would linger. Not just on the coat, but on my hair and even my skin, a clammy combination of formaldehyde and latex gloves and my own sweat.
There’s nothing quite like the bravado of a room full of high achieving type-As coming up against a significant number of corpses (+/- heads) for the very first time. Immediately, I broke out in a cold sweat. I had a furtive look around to see how everyone else seemed to be coping with the cadavers: facial expressions ranged from absolutely calm, to grimly determined, to a few who seemed to be looking longingly at the sink. Consider, after all, that this was Freshers’ Week. Most people had just moved out of home for the first time and had thus been behaving in a manner befitting this newfound freedom. Surreptitiously, a boy took a small step back and leaned casually against the wall. I knotted my hands behind my back.
It wasn’t enough though, just to be in the presence of the undressed-and-cut-up deceased. Now we were medical students, so we had to get in there and have a proper look. Not to be left behind in my very first week, I touched a gloved finger to a shriveled arm. To my quiet horror, it was coldly moist.
We became accomplished corpse pokers, and (somewhat) accustomed to the smell. A few weeks later, we were allowed to take turns at the dissection itself. We took a small sharp blade to the thickened left ventricle of a heart. I marveled at the heart sitting placidly in my hand. It had lived a whole life in someone else. It always amazed me to imagine the former life of these people that had been generous enough to donate their bodies, for us to learn and make mistakes. The life (if that’s the right word) of a cadaver is not terribly dignified.
When I made a l tentative incision it was tough and fibrous, like overcooked steak. That was the end of my meat eating; I have been a strict vegetarian since. Occasionally someone will ask, conversationally, why I don’t eat meat. They usually regret asking.
As with almost anything, we became habituated to hanging out with the cadavers twice a week, and eventually even those who were most squeamish to begin with were pulling tendons to make dead fingers wriggle. The head technician kept a watchful eye from the upstairs gallery. Apocryphal stories abounded about dead hands thrown down on bars in days past; more likely were bored students poking each other with femurs at the end of a long session.
The technicians were mostly trainee surgeons; deft with the bone saws and unafraid of sharp blades. Little groups of us would huddle around the slab and they would explain methodically how the different pieces fitted together, peel back the layers, lift up the delicate strings of nerves for our examination. I was secretly (and illogically) surprised that the nerves were not, of course, coloured yellow as they were in the textbooks. (I kept this observation to myself.) Sometimes, as the term progressed, the technicians would unfold and chat to us. One had grown up in Iran, with Farsi as his native tongue; moved to Pakistan as an adolescent where he had learned Urdu, and now practiced in Europe in English, his third language. It seemed to me that he was certainly One of Those People who were Just Cut Out for medicine.
Two years later we finished the anatomy curriculum and moved on to real patients. (They were no less terrifying but altogether warmer.) A new lab was built and the cadavers were transported the short distance down the road, reportedly at night to avoid traffic. I have no way of knowing, of course, but I like to imagine them loaded up in the back of the lorry, hearts cold and still, safely cocooned in their storage tanks.
Tags: death, emily r, medical school, work
ahhhhhh
i mean “cool” but also ahhhhh
Wait, you get to go to medical school when you’re 18 in Ireland?
Yeah, if you come in direct from secondary school its 5/6 years depending on which university, if you already have a degree you can do the course in 4 years 🙂
It’s not really specifically ‘medical school’, you just go to regular university right out of school and do a course in medicine for I think 5 years? Not sure about that bit.
LOVE IT, this is so good. If there was a job market for it, I would 100 percent be an anatomy instructor.
My favorite weird moment from my experience in the gross lab (as an undergrad – I never went to med school) was our instructor pointing out tiny little nubbins of bone on a cadaver’s vertebrae. They were bone cancer, he said, but so slow-growing she never even knew she had it. It was so strange and amazing to know something about this woman that she never would. Also, kinda of like the “no-duh” realization that nerves aren’t yellow, it was my first time realizing cancer is something you can see.
Actually, you *can* be an anatomy instructor. A friend of mine (who now works in collections and acquisitions at an art museum) used to teach gross anatomy to medical students. Her degree is in anthropology, so you don’t have to go to med school…at least she didn’t.
Jealous! I mean, I know it’s a real job – it’s just when I looked into it at the time, it seemed like prospects were limited. I’d of had to do some sort of grad school, since my degree wasn’t in anything relevant. HMM time to retrain?
I have no desire to be a medical professional but I sort of want to experience a Gross Anatomy course.
You can do that! My friend once took an anatomy course at Hopkins one summer and got to poke around in a bunch of bodies (respectfully). She said it was gross and strange and amazing and loved it A LOT.
NEAT.
I can say with grim, smug confidence that as a forensic anthropology student who had studied at the Body Farm, watching my fellow nursing students’ reactions to our school’s cadaver lab was just precious. The first day in the lab, my lab partner abruptly grabbed my hand when the body bags were unzipped, and whispered to me, “I’m scared.”
I laughed. “They’re dead, they can’t hurt you.”
“But they smell so bad“, she said, wrinkling her nose.
“You think this is bad”, I whispered to my lab partner, “you haven’t known true joy until you’ve been knee-deep in human decomp under the hot July sun.”
The lab partner never returned to class.
So… do you have, like, a memoir or anything I could be reading? 🙂
Hah! I should really get around to writing that. As soon as I finish this multimedia vampire serial fiction project I’m working on.
god what even is my life.
Oh my god THE BODY FARM. I learned about this from the Stephen Fry show where he tours America. GAVE ME THE SHUDDERS IT DID. Just all of the…containers…with cadavers in them, waiting to decompose and be studied. Simultaneously horrifying but fascinating. (Mental note: I should use this as an example next time I try to explain Kristeva’s essays on abjection to someone.)
I am more on the osteology side than the decomp side, so I prefer my bones to be clean and dry and in a lab somewhere*, but yeah, no, it doesn’t bother me at all.
I didn’t go into medicine because if someone is alive and in terrible pain, and bleeding/has a bone broken through their skin/projectile vomiting/etc. I will pass the fuck out. Boom. Fainting ahoy. I am a fainting CHAMPION. I probably hold the world record in re: fainting. I faint like one of those fainting goats that faints all the time.
But if they’re dead there’s nothing I can possibly do to hurt them. I can’t mess them up any worse than they already are. I can, however, help them and, in the event I’m working with an unidentified person, help give them back their name, and give the families some closure, and restore their dignity.
It’s a weird calling.
* that could have been a dick joke but I took the high road
Good for you.
That is pretty awesome. I like that you’re able to help their families. And I definitely see where you’re coming from. I was at one point considering midwifery (there is now a course which allows you to become a midwife without having a nursing degree) and then realised while I think birth is amazing and fascinating, I don’t want to be on the receiving end of a baby being born. There is a lot of… ick involved. Not to mention if something went wrong, I would just fall apart, emotionally.
Seems like the right place and time to highly recommend Mary Roach’s book “Stiff”!
One of my genuinely favourite books!
Literally one of my favorite nonfiction books of all time.
Though I didn’t end up getting the medical education I once envisioned for myself, I have fond memories of the small mammal dissections we did in my high school anatomy class. Winston the rat and Samantha the cat taught me so much.
wait wait wait, it’s actually called “Gross Anatomy”?
Gross as in total or complete, but yeah.
My ex once smuggled me into his school’s lab to meet his cadaver. I was terrified, of course, but also insanely curious.
The top of the cadaver’s skull had been rather neatly sliced off. The head was empty, and the brain sat off to the side. I touched the brain, just a little, and had a WHOA moment, like you describe with the heart. Inside this brain on the table was a lifetime’s worth of memories and joy and sadness and everything else.
I was glad to hear of the students’ reverence (and kind of creepy fondness) for their cadavers.
Ahhhhhh
I wish I wasn’t so squeamish, or I’d totally be into dissecting cadavers.
I went to that Bodies exhibit with all the preserved pieces of Chinese people (most likely political prisoners – kinda puts a damper on the excitement) and yeah. It was fascinating but also disgusting. I was already vegetarian, but I tried to eat a mushroom wrap after that and…. nope. I can't do mushrooms much anymore either.
Also, this was great.
Thanks for this! And A+ image choices. I’m a doctor in the US and I found anatomy lab amazing and horrifying and intimidating and all the things you describe. I loved holding and dissecting the heart, exploring the chambers and all the little details. I was sad to give it up at the end of that day; since I knew I was never going to be a heart surgeon, I figured that was the last chance I would have to see a heart in person. We used the same cadaver for the entire course (ours was only about 7 months long, but very intense) so we really got to know him. I still think of him as my first patient and one of my most important teachers.
That is pretty awesome. I like that you're able to help their families. And I definitely see where you're coming from. I was at one point considering midwifery (there is now a course which allows you to become a midwife without having a nursing degree) and then realised while I think birth is amazing and fascinating, I don't want to be on the receiving end of a baby being born. There is a lot of… ick involved. Not to mention if something went wrong, I would just fall apart, emotionally.
My mom once told me that at the first session of her grad school anatomy class, the teacher began casually waving around severed hands and feet. A few people left class immediately, and a few more didn’t come back for the next day. They only got to the real work once they’d weeded out the squeamish.
My medical school is so so strict about being respectful with the bodies, and treating them as you would a living patient (only uncovering the bits you need to work on, returning them to as complete as state as possible and recovering them before you leave at the end of the lab, NO PHOTOS EVER). It made dissection both weirder and more interesting to have their personness emphasised so hard. I expected to find it a lot harder to deal with then it was — it was so strange at first, and then so fascinating to be able to follow muscles, tendons, nerves. Sometimes you do find tumours the person never knew they had. And sometimes you are holding a heart in your hand.
I took anatomy in high school and part of the class involved a field trip to a college of chiropracty to see cadavers. It was utterly fascinating. At one point we sat in stadium -type seats while a dude gave a presentation that ended with him dropping a lower leg/foot directly on some girls in the front row. One of them casually picked it up and handed it back to him, NBD.
A few years ago I was on the train and this dude saw a hot chick and sat down right next to her despite the many empty seats on the train and started talking at her. She mentioned she was studying forensic pathology & had been to The Body Farm and described it and the guy blanched and started loudly talking about how OMG DISGUSSSSSSSSTING that was why would anybody want to dooooooo that. If it were possible for a lady to set a dude’s head on fire with her brain that dude would have turned into a charred match stick. So much contempt in her glance.
Strangely, having to dissect through my cadaver’s hair for the first time was the most emotional for me. Seeing the inside of the eyeball was surprisingly cool (as well as the itty bitty ear bones).
And – despite being thoroughly tested on the subject – I still can never keep the muscles of the forearm straight.
UCC then … am I right?
Great description, I felt almost the same when I started the med school. I have kept for myself these thoughts about who were the persons/cadavers with who I learned how actually the human body is?. For me nerves are yellows anyway… you made me laugh a lot with these comment .:)