The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [83]
Charlie may sound like a newcomer, one of the new breed of computer-simulation-loving anatomy instructors, but he is actually an old-timer, a white-haired bear nearing retirement age. “So if the field is rusted over,” I ask, “what is the point of teaching it this way?” I look around the lab, gesture at one of the cadavers. “Is it just tradition?”
“Sure, that’s a big part of it. But the real deal is, you can’t do medicine without it. You have to have that basic understanding of anatomy. Of course, I think you can make it a lot more streamlined. Teach it in a much more focused way. Doctors don’t remember any of this stuff. Ninety percent of what we throw at them doesn’t stick.”
It’s a good thing Dana’s not in earshot, or these two might be headed for a smackdown.
I ask how he would propose anatomy be taught.
“Well, for example, you can make a case for studying anatomy solely from the perspective of connective tissue.”
“You mean like fascia?”
“Yeah. Fascia. Ligaments. Tendons. Mesentery. Connective tissue organizes the body. It gives you a clear organizational structure, especially in the limbs. If you know your deep fascia compartments—posterior, anterior, and so on—you’re set. You don’t need to memorize every muscle and nerve. Likewise, you can use connective tissue as your highway for looking at all the systems and parts.
“Plus,” he goes on to say, “it makes sense from an embryological point of view to focus on connective tissue. It’s one of the first things to develop in utero. It surrounds every nerve fiber. Every muscle cell. It’s what holds the body together. And, of course, over a lifetime, it changes. In fact, some people say aging is connective tissue becoming tighter.”
Now that’s a novel way to look at getting old.
“Most of us don’t give our connective tissue any thought,” I point out. “It’s not like bones or muscles. You’re not even aware you have it.”
Charlie grins. “Right. Well, you would if it were missing.”
How true. Everything is connected. Every word Charlie had just said, it strikes me, could be applied more broadly. One can think about life solely in terms of different kinds of connective tissue: The attachments to family and friends that sustain you. The relationships that anchor you. The bonds that tighten with age. On some deep, unseen anatomical level, connectedness is vital. Without it, you would fall apart.
SHORTLY AFTER HENRY Gray said his temporary goodbyes to St. George’s, H. V. Carter said goodbyes of his own, only his were for good. “Have now taken some decided steps which have severed my connection with the Hospital,” he reports on July 27, 1857. “No longer Demonstrator. Did not apply for the curatorship, though had good interest. Indeed, the thing is done and I am not quite certain how wisely, but the monotony and uselessness of my present life, as I have myself made it, was the final inducement. And yet, I have no fixed plan for the future—one occupation gone and none other selected: Was this prudent?”
No, certainly not, he knows. But Carter felt he had no choice; the time had come to leave St. George’s. This was much more than a professional crisis; it ran deep and personal. Increasingly over the past year, he had been questioning his purpose in life but was again and again coming up empty. For instance, in a remarkable passage written six months earlier, in January 1857, Carter had examined this emptiness with a dissector’s eye. “My life, as I too much anatomize it, daily, or hourly, is far from happy…. God is hidden. Christ, I know not…. I am full of indolence, lonely, uncheered and unassociated, unaided, without plans or purposes and like a thing only looked at.”
One of the great liberties of keeping a diary, I believe, is the freedom to indulge in