The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [5]
“I haven’t dissected anything since high school biology,” one of the three women admits, breaking the ice. “And that was a frog.”
This seems like the right moment to make an admission of my own: “I should tell you, I am not a student here. Dr. Rohde gave me permission to come to your lectures and labs. I’m just going to be an observer.”
All but one of them look as though they would pay to change places with me. Gergen, the exception, a tall, husky, hairy guy who says he has never dissected anything in his life, cheerfully volunteers to begin the dissection. Now, technically, it will be Gergen’s first cut, but not this body’s. Like all the cadavers used in this ten-week class in gross anatomy, it was worked on during a previous course. Instead of fresh bodies like those routinely autopsied on CSI—blue-lipped and gray but still lifelike—these are closer to something from a Discovery Channel special. The cadavers are shrunken like unwrapped Egyptian mummies. The skin, where still intact, is tan and leathery, and the exposed inner flesh is as dark and dried as beef jerky. The heads, hands, and feet are wrapped in strips of gauze, which gives the impression that they had been badly burned. As Dr. Sutherland explained during the orientation, the gauze serves two functions: it helps preserve the delicate parts for a longer period, and it also protects us, in a sense.
“It’s usually most impactful to see the hands or the face,” he had said, treading carefully with his words, “because that’s really what represents a person’s identity.” When dissecting other parts, one quickly learns to dissociate, but this is much harder when you see the eyes or the mouth. Emotions can come up unexpectedly, he then added. “Sometimes, you’ll be dissecting away—maybe you’re halfway through the course—and then you’ll remove a piece of gauze and there’s a tattoo and you just stop cold. Or maybe you see nail polish.” Any individualizing mark is a stark reminder that this is not just a body but somebody. As Dr. Sutherland had explained, this is one reason why the first dissection is in a relatively neutral location, the thorax, otherwise known as the chest.
Though I am the sole spectator here today, I take comfort in knowing I am well represented in history. Human dissection has been a riveting spectacle for centuries, and the curious, whether by invitation or paid ticket, have long pressed into crowded rooms, craning necks and breathing through perfumed handkerchiefs, to witness that first ghastly slice, then the next, and the next. In Europe, the need to create a space conducive to teaching, learning, and observing resulted in the Western world’s first “anatomical theater,” built in Italy in 1594 at the University of Padua. A steeply raked amphitheater that accommodated three hundred, it became the model for other facilities that sprang up at competing schools, including the College of Physicians in London. Always at the center was the dissecting table, with the first circle of spectators barely a blood spurt removed. At UCSF, I and my fellow novice anatomists stand not in a theater but in a no-frills lab. In order to get the best view of what is being dissected at our table, I have to perch on the rungs of a metal stool.
Theater of Anatomy, London, 1815
Our cadaver, who in life probably stood no more than five foot two, does not bear the classic “Y” incision of an autopsy (shoulders to sternum, then straight down the abdomen to the pubis). Instead, a kind of double doorway was incised in her chest: the skin cut across the collarbones as well as beneath the ribs—roughly marking the top and bottom of the thorax—and then sliced down the middle. Before making a new incision, we need to “unpack” the previous work. As Laura reads instructions from the lab guide, Gergen folds back the two large panels of skin, then grasps the edges of the underlying breastplate, a solid shield of ribs and muscles that had been precut with a surgical saw. Gergen lifts, and a fresh