The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [76]
“Lateral eye movement?” I offer after a long moment.
“Exactly,” Dana says. “Very good.”
I step back while Dana finishes up with the fourth-years. To their credit, it strikes me, these two young people knew they were missing something and wanted a remedy. But how do you know you don’t know something? And what about all those students who are not here in the lab?
As Dana and I return to her office, I ask, “Are you worried that these students with less anatomy training than in the past will be ill prepared as doctors?”
“Ultimately, they’ll be fine,” she says without hesitation. “They’ll know enough.”
I’m not satisfied with this answer, as Dana can tell.
“I think it’s more a question of not having that ‘total vision’ of the body,” she emphasizes, “of not understanding things as well as they could. So much of understanding anatomy is just tying it all together, and you don’t get that when you do little body parts.” At the same time, she is not unrealistic in her expectations. “I don’t expect them to become anatomists. No, I appreciate that I know the body so well, I don’t have to memorize anything. And, as you know, my big thing is, the more you understand anatomy, the less you have to memorize.”
“Yes, Dr. Dana Rohde, the anti-mnemonicist,” I say teasingly.
She laughs, then slips back into teacher mode as we stand alone in the hallway: “Take the cranial nerves, for example. Once you’ve dissected them, you can picture cranial nerve VII coming out of the brain stem and going through the skull, and you know exactly how it gets to the tongue. And likewise with cranial nerve IX—you just see it taking a totally different path to a totally different part of the tongue. And you’d never even think you’d have to memorize it.” You would simply see it, she reiterates. “That’s the vision I have.”
WE HAVE SOMETHING that the other students are lining up to see: we have a good cadaver. Actually, that’s understating it some. A good cadaver is one in which the structures come clean easily, separate distinctly, and are not surrounded by excessive amounts of fat or obscured by calcification. What makes our body not just good but very good (and very popular) is that it has a fully intact reproductive system. Given that donor cadavers are generally quite elderly (the average age in this group is eighty-four) and, if female, have typically had hysterectomies, this is a rare sight. Certainly, it is my first.
Our cadaver’s uterus is about the size of a fist, lavender-colored, and supple to the touch, unlike in the prosection, by comparison, where the organ has literally shriveled to the size and texture of a walnut. What’s more, while the prosection is missing the Fallopian tubes, here they are in perfect shape, extending from the uterus in twin arcs. (Fallopian tubes are not attached to the ovaries.) At the tips of each tube are the tiny egg-grabbing fingers called fimbriae and, just below these, the ovaries, plump and almond-shaped. The stabilizing ligaments and surrounding tissue are likewise in place, clearly visible through the glossy peritoneum draped over the uterus and ovaries. In fact, the whole looks in such good working order, even in an eighty-eight-year-old body, that it is strangely easy to imagine, to see, the system in operation: An egg being pitched from an ovary. The fimbria, hovering overhead, catching it in its grasp. The mesosalpinx flapping gently, nudging the egg through the Fallopian tube to the uterus, where it unites with a sperm cell. And finally, in time-lapse motion, the uterus expanding, filling with life as if filling with breath.
Once you have images like this banked in your head, you cannot help viewing people’s bodies differently