Dead teach the living

 First week of the first year of medical school, we were taken to the dissection hall, divided into 6 groups and sent to different tables where formalin soaked cadavers were placed. We were told that for the next couple of days we have to complete reading the first 20 pages of Cunningham’s manual of dissection, get used to the smell of formalin and only then will we be allowed to touch the cadaver. What can you expect from over-excited 18 year olds, who were living their dream of having gotten into MBBS? Yes, everybody pretended to read! Those 20 pages made us feel like goats trying to read Greek! Medicine has its own language, it takes time. So one after the other everyone started giving up, and started getting to know their batchmates; of course it was important, we would be spending more than half a decade with this lot of people and would go through literal life and death experiences together. The shy ones started observing the details of the room, the quote that said, “this is the place where the dead teach the living”, the board ‘anatomy’ written with bones, the expression of the cadaver; wondering about how the old man’s life must have been, he looked calm, had he decided to donate his body so that we could learn or was he found dead and no one turned up for him. Two hours of all this pondering for two more days and getting better with the ‘language’, we were set to be taught anatomy, dissection and dissect.

I loved it, I couldn’t wait for the theory classes to get over before dissection hours started everyday. I knew right then the ‘inner beauty’ all the great philosophers mention about. God, what planning, what finesse; nerves, muscles, vasculature! And so many variations! I felt privileged. 

I remember once while dissecting the palm, everyone was so focused looking at the structure and someone tugged at a tendon in the forearm and the finger suddenly flexed, we were shit scared! Then we realised that this was a easy way of learning function of a muscle by looking at its action.

Then came the day when we used hammers and chisel to open the skull vault, and behold! The sight of brain; all the memories, personality, body control, thoughts of a person were stored in that one organ! It was overwhelming but we proceeded with learning and dwelled on the philosophy later in our hostel rooms. 

A few months later, we reached the thorax. I called my Dad the day I dissected the heart, held a heart for the first time. Nothing I had done before could compare to that joy. The valves, the strings of the heart, the small cushions of fat- something so delicate yet strong keeps us going through life. I can see why many develop a spiritual view over the years in the medical field; the miracle of life and death, the intricate design of the body and cellular processes baffle the mind, there is too much blame and too much gratitude to account a series of chance events to all this, and that, chance factor can make it all go wrong. Maybe some just want to believe there is a source, ‘a higher power’, sane enough to keep up the balance.

                                                     Photo from Pinterest.