The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [53]
Alas, this illusion is dispelled, Carter writes, “when we approximate ourselves to the tank for injecting [filled with preserving fluid], by the unpoetical odours there abiding.”
Fixing his gaze on the specimens of distorted fetuses and animals lining the shelves, he now sees something almost sinister within: “Look at the gaunt bottles, filled with huge deformities, some in mock derision of our best and earliest state—childhood. Infants without parts—and to cap all—the brat of a Chimpanzee so like any human offspring that one doubts one’s nature,” a reference no doubt to the emerging theory of evolution.
“All nature swarms around us,” Carter adds sardonically, “the student is a very Adam! He is the keeper of a menagerie—of bones.”
Nine
IF YOU THINK OF BONE AS BONELIKE—ROCK-HARD, INERT, THE prototypical caveman’s club—you are mistaken. In the living body, bone is actually a dynamic tissue shot through with nerve fibers and blood vessels. Bone hurts when it is injured. It bleeds when it is broken. It is constantly being built up and broken down. Also, in spite of its popularity as a shade of wall paint, “bone white” is not the hue of living bone. Imagine instead a pale rose.
As part of our skeletal system, bones, in the simplest sense, keep us from being a puddle on the floor. But they also serve as cages, boxes, and basins to protect vital structures and act as incubators for new red blood cells. We are born with more than a hundred more bones than we have as adults, for many of our bones fuse together in the first years of life, such as the bones of the skull, and a final few, the bones of the pelvic girdle, don’t fuse till puberty.
There are exactly 206 bones in the adult human skeleton, and they range in size from smaller than a tooth (inner ear bones) to bigger than a forearm (the femur, the longest, largest, and heaviest bone in the body). Likewise, bone names run the gamut, from dull (the frontal bone, the nasal bone) to surprisingly clever. The hip bone known as the innominate, for instance, literally means the unnamed bone, “so called,” Henry Gray explains in Gray’s Anatomy, “from bearing no resemblance to any known object.” Many bone names come from Greek or Latin roots and are evocative even before tracing their literal meaning. When I first heard the names of the bones of the wrist, I thought of planets, a whole new solar system: scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezoid, trapezium, capitate, hamate. And, in fact, the lunate bone is so named for being moon-shaped.
Whether delicate, dislocated, fractured, shattered, arthritic, or amputated, bones figure prominently in the daily life of the average physical therapist. Consequently, osteology, the branch of anatomy focusing on the bones, has been a large part of this course, especially in lectures. In lab, we always dissect down to the bone but not necessarily into it, as our primary objective is to examine in context the muscle, tissue, tendons, and ligaments that may sustain damage when bones are diseased or injured. We have become well acquainted with many parts of the skeleton by this point, just a couple of weeks shy of the final. But by lab’s end today, we will uncover twenty-seven more bones, all of which can neatly fit inside a glove, and do: the bones of the hand.
Anyone peeking through the lab door might easily mistake the lot of us for the world’s most serious manicurists. Two students hover over each hand at each body, cutting and tweezing small strips of skin. I am paired with Rachel, while on the other side of the table, Becky and Jenny handle the left appendage. These are a man’s hands, big and meaty.
I have taken the place of Liz, the self-described surfer chick from Santa Cruz, who dropped out of school just yesterday. I