The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [103]
“That’s right,” I hear him say as I walk toward the door. “And the mnemonic is SGBF: Say Grace Before Food.”
Amen, I think, as the door to the anatomy lab closes behind me.
Epilogue
TWO YEARS PASSED BEFORE I RETURNED. I WAS NERVOUS BEFORE-HAND, nervous in a way that brought to mind the very first time I had made the trip. I could easily remember stepping off the elevator, rounding the corner, and heading down that dim, narrow hall, looking for room 1320. The hallway had seemed to get dimmer and narrower the farther I got, if only because there was a bottleneck of students at the door—pharmacy students—the half of the class who’d accepted Sexton’s invitation to visit the anatomy lab a day early. It wasn’t that the door was locked. The problem was, no one wanted to go first, the unspoken fear being that an initiation was about to begin. Inside that lab over the next ten weeks, you would be forced to confront your innermost anxieties about death and dying while taking apart a dead body—an emotional vivisection, of sorts. How would you handle it? I wasn’t sure how I’d do myself.
I remembered hearing a young guy behind me ask another, “Have you ever seen a dead body?”
“Um, yeah, but I’ve never touched one,” guy two answered, sounding none too thrilled at the prospect.
Henry Gray and H. V. Carter would have gotten a kick out of that. As young men, those two certainly did not enter the Kinnerton Street lab expecting to learn life-changing lessons about mortality. They did not need them. Gray and Carter had each seen and touched plenty of dead bodies before they began dissecting them. And when they did dissect, many of the cadavers were likely close to their own ages. In the early nineteenth century, in England as in the United States, the life expectancy at birth for a male was half as long as today—just thirty-eight years. For a female, it was only two years longer.
Not only did people die at a younger age a century and a half ago, but death was dealt with more openly and with a greater attention to ceremony. This was particularly so in Victorian England, where the queen herself, widowed at age forty-two, set the example for mourning. People generally did not die in hospitals or nursing homes at the time, but instead where they had lived their lives, in their own homes, with loved ones at their bedsides. I will never forget a line in H. V. Carter’s diary. After receiving news of his mother’s death, Carter asks himself, “What did I feel?
“Regret, mainly,” he answers—regret that he hadn’t been there.
THIS TIME, I had come to the anatomy lab by myself. There was no line of students waiting outside, and, in fact, the lab itself was almost empty when I arrived just before 8:00 A.M. The class I’d come to observe was called Epilogue. It was part of an intensive “refresher” course for second-year med students before they took their board exams. Frankly, I thought it might be refreshing for me, too, a chance to reconnect with some of my anatomy teachers and to get reinspired, a coda to my experiences at UCSF.
Though the class was set in the lab, the students would not be doing any dissecting that day. Prosections would suffice. To make room for the whole class, the dissection tables had been pushed off to one end of the lab and all the cadavers lay on top. Piled two to three to a table, they appeared to be huddled together for warmth, waiting, quietly waiting. Waiting to be of use. Waiting, it seemed at that moment, for me.
Remember how scary they’d seemed at first? I said to myself. The thought of what was inside those bags had been so much worse than the reality. I could still picture myself filing into the lab with the pharmacy students. No one spoke. It was as if there were forty pink elephants in the room—except that all forty were encased in bright white vinyl and bore the unmistakable profile of a human being: rounded skull, nose, mound at the stomach, jutting toes. I headed to the back counter, I recalled, and put down my things. As I eyed a body on a nearby table, I suddenly noticed its small