The stench of formaldehyde made my nostrils tingle, my stomach constrict. No matter how much Vick’s Vaporub I smeared around my nose, the smell triggering my brain that there was a dead body in the room would not, could not, dissipate.
The comfortable Dr.Bill rambled on about respect for the dead body, while the students shifted their feet and swallowed dry throats. We can do this. We volunteered to come. We’re freaking anatomy students. This is our field. Why should this bother us? No one wanted to be the one to faint at the sight of a dead body. As they wheeled the body out, we fanned out around the room. Some students blanched at the sight of the cold, plastic body bag. This was real. The pretty pre-vet student moved behind the lab counter. Her frightened eyes met mine. Jonathan cleared his throat and smiled shakily at me. He whispered under the droning professor’s voice, “If you throw up, face the wall.” I smirked, “Yeah, well, if you need someone to catch you when you fall, come stand by me.” The students standing nearest grinned. A few shifted away from us using exaggerated movements. I forced a frown and pretended to pay attention to Dr.Bill lecturing about past irreverent students. Our recalled camaraderie drained the tension permeating the room.
We clustered around the glove boxes, politely pushing through twelve warm bodies to pull on stretchy, pink gloves. A few giggles at Jonathan, who was the only boy. A few ripped gloves. And a few minutes later, we again fanned out to our respective standing areas on the tile floor.
The gloves gave the students a false sense of protection and security.
Dr.Bill had to wait a moment for the tittering among them to quiet before he rattled off something important, and began to unzip the bag.
Not even the smell of formaldehyde growing stronger could distract me. I focused on looking into the open bag. Another layer. Ugh. Why did they wrap it in white cloths? Banning the word ‘mummy’ from my mind, I leaned forward.
Keep a cool head.
Don’t lock your knees.
Breathe through your mouth.
Look for what you know.
Dr.Bill exposed a sliver of the human body. I suppressed a flinch, and forced myself to stare and think logically.
Vastus medialis. Gracilis. Patella. Adductor longus. Where were the origins?
The whole body lay exposed on the table. My tentativeness warped into curiosity, which then morphed into awe. In my new confidence, I walked around the table near the head. I could see the whole human. That’s what it was. A human. A human lived and died in this shell. A human bumped her shin on a coffee table in this. A human took pride in this.
And this served her well.
This carried her soul for more than eighty years.
When this touched the coffee table, this sent a message from a touch receptor in her shin to its own dorsal nerve ganglia where the message was pushed up her spinal cord to the medulla oblongata. The message crossed over fibers through the mid-brain to the thalamus. Before a split-second had passed, another synapse was projected out to an area near the surface of the cerebral cortex called the postcentral gyrus.
This body then probably jumped as she yelped in pain.
She could not separate this dried out carcass from herself.
This was her.
But she died.
Now what was it?
A body.
Nothing more than a bundle of muscles, adipose tissue, and organs.
The urge to take this apart, to figure out what was going on inside us, to learn why we feel the way we do, to know where our food goes, to know how we breathe, to know what our muscles look like, suddenly consumed me. The annoying hours I spent in Dr.Kirkley’s lectures didn’t seem half so bothersome as I tried to remember what he said.
I hesitantly pointed out a few leg muscles to Dr.Bill.
He smiled warmly, encouraging me to continue.
I rattled off some more, but got stumped on the forearm muscles.
He accepted it as a challenge to quiz us on the muscles.
We crowded closer to the table, only a couple hanging back.
The chest was lifted, and 18 hands explored the heart chambers and lung cavity. Same for the diaphragm. The small intestines were pulled out and examined. She had a hysterectomy. Hidden spleen and liver were poked. Muscles were identified. She had a pacemaker. Lungs were passed around. Never mind manners, we needed to learn.
Our desire for knowledge surpassed our fear of the unknown, our fear of a human without skin.
