The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [32]
At this, I can imagine applause breaking out in the St. George’s auditorium.
Dr. Brodie waits for silence to return. He then adds, in a voice so resonant, so full of wisdom, that it carries across the centuries and reaches me here: “Let me advise you to pursue the same course through life, recollecting that, even as practitioners, you must still be students. Knowledge is endless, and the most experienced person will find that he has still much to learn.”
Six
TWELVE DAYS LATER, I AM BACK IN THE ANATOMY LAB. IT IS DAY one, number two—the first lab of a new course—and virtually everything is different: the time (9:00 A.M.), the teachers (no more Dana, Dhillon, or Sexton), and the class size (just twenty-six). Even the students themselves look noticeably different—more athletic, more tactile and engaged with the physical, which is fitting as these are physical therapy students. But the most striking change of all is with the cadavers. They are fresh. In fact, they are as fresh as medical school cadavers can be—only six months dead—which makes them ideal for the coursework ahead. The focus of the class is neuromuscular anatomy, how the body moves and how sensation—pain, in particular—is transmitted and felt. With the permission of course director Dr. Kim Topp, I will be attending the thrice-weekly hourlong lectures as well as the three-hour labs. Dana had put in a good word for me.
This is not only the first lab of the session but also the students’ very first day in the UCSF master’s program in physical therapy, so they have barely had a chance to meet one another. Nevertheless, I, in my green scrubs, would never be mistaken for one of them. Dr. Topp requires her “PT” students to wear white lab coats, which make them look more like junior pharmacists than the pharmacy students ever did. Every so often, another dress code will be enforced, I have been told: sports bras and shorts, to be worn on days when the class will be supplementing the study of the dead with the anatomy of the living—themselves.
“So, do we just start?” murmurs Kristen, one of the four students at the table I have joined.
For several minutes now, the entire class has been silently standing at their assigned tables, waiting for instructions from Dr. Topp, who is slowly walking the perimeter. None come.
Another minute passes before I see the message sinking in: the class is expected to have read the syllabus in advance and to get right to work. “Yes, I think so,” I whisper back to Kristen. “Here, let me show you how to put a blade on a scalpel.”
The others at the table are Kelly, Cheyenne, and one of the few males in the class, Sam. The sixth member of our group is a sixty-two-year-old female who, according to the “Cause of Death” list on the side wall, had died of a stroke. The only incisions on her body are the small cuts at the neck and inner thigh where the mortician had injected the embalming fluid into major blood vessels, thereby using the circulatory system for one last go-round. After a half year spent in darkness as the preservatives preserved, this morning marks the body’s return to light.
The skin feels moist and supple and, though cold, surprisingly lifelike, thanks to a wetting solution whose key ingredient is, believe it or not, Downy fabric softener. Surrounding the cadaver are puddles of clear liquid, as if it had been sweating profusely in its vinyl body bag. By smell alone, I recognize this as excess embalming fluid, though the fumes do not bother me as much as they once did. There is no scent of decomposition.
The head is wrapped in gauze and covered in clear plastic,