The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [31]
“I do, too.”
I had come by the lab mainly to say some goodbyes, since I would not be coming to the students’ final exam. I chatted with Massoud and Laura but didn’t see most of the others I had gotten to know. This was an optional review session, and on this beautiful afternoon, many had exercised the option to skip it, understandably. I, too, decided to cut my stay short. I waved to Dana and Sexton, who were bouncing back and forth among three small groups—I would catch up with them sometime later—and went to retrieve my bag from the windowsill. A couple of steps away, Dhillon was supervising two students I did not recognize. “What are you guys working on?” I asked.
One of the two explained that they were third-year med students practicing surgical techniques. He told me wryly he was trying his best “not to make too much of a mess” of the head. From where I stood, it did not look as if he was succeeding. As for his friend, he was a slight young man holding an electric bone saw above the chest of a massive cadaver, aiming for the sternum. He was the very picture of apprehension as he turned on the saw, which I took as my cue to move on.
At the far end of the lab, I saw another curiosity: seven people in street clothes sitting on stools in a semicircle, holding sketchpads in their laps. They were from the Art Institute of California. Once a quarter, they come here to sketch as an adjunct to their life-drawing class. Laid out on the table before them was not a cadaver but a selection of expertly dissected specimens—prosections, they are called (a shortening of the term professional dissections)—a still life of preserved arms and legs, a torso and a head, their muscles and vessels bared.
“It really helps to be able to see what’s under the bumps,” a young woman told me in all seriousness.
I couldn’t help smiling: bumps. I liked that.
I asked the student nearest me if I could see his sketches. He was a big pasty-skinned guy, the kind one would guess spends an inordinate amount of time playing video games. And, in fact, he told me that he is studying character modeling at school, with the hope of becoming a video game designer. He flipped back a couple of pages on his pad so I could take a look. His sketches were good—not H. V. Carter good, mind you, but they had dimension. In one drawing, he had reassembled all the separate parts before him into a full anatomical figure.
I complimented him, but he shook his head and looked up from his pad with doleful eyes. “Drawing at the zoo was a lot easier,” he said.
The UCSF staff person overseeing the art students’ visit was a woman named Andy, whom I had seen many times but never met till now. Andy explained that she does everything from ordering the cadavers and lab supplies to scheduling classes and cleaning up. Just then, the lab’s wall phone began ringing. “Oh, and I answer the phone, too,” Andy said as she rushed to get it.
After a minute, she rejoined me. I told Andy that I had been attending Dana’s class and had learned more about anatomy than I ever could have imagined. “I’m actually going to kind of miss coming to the lab,” I admitted.
Andy nodded, as if she knew exactly what I meant. Her eyes sparkled behind small, thick rimless lenses.
Before leaving the room, I clutched the doorframe and took a last look around. Even with the harsh lights, the well-scrubbed linoleum, and the funk of formaldehyde, it seemed less like a lab than like a library—a place where not only human anatomy but the spirit of anatomical discovery is preserved. And there, in the far back corner, I could easily imagine a small man in a black coat, Henry Gray. He had been here all this time, silently working.
BACK ACROSS PARNASSUS STREET, inside the Special Collections Room, Dr. Brodie is