Begin Cutting: Education by Knife

© CAROLLYNN TICE/DREAMSTIME.COM

“[T]here exists an allegiance between the dead and the unborn of which we the living are merely the ligature.”

—Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead

Monsters. The label was affixed to a display case that housed a collection of glass jars. Sealed with a rusted screw-top lid or damp wooden cork, they contained malformed fetuses preserved in fluid. The term, seemingly a cruel joke, was part of an outmoded medical lexicon and described a fetus with gross congenital anomalies. Shelves of these specimens lined the passageway at the south entrance of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s anatomy laboratory, displayed safely behind glass that spanned the height of the walls. Like many students before me, I passed by this grisly shrine during the first week of medical school and saw my own uneasy reflection in the glare of light against glass.

Taped to the double doors that led into the laboratory was a list of cadaver assignments by table number and cause of death: respiratory arrest, myocardial infarction, aortic aneurysm, pulmonary embolism, cerebrovascular accident. My cadaver lay at table number ten. Cause of death? Multi-infarct dementia. Death, that is to say, by madness.

Past the doors, the white cinder-block walls of the lab were lined with posters and diagrams portraying the intricate network of nerves, muscles, and blood vessels in the human body. In one corner, the chalk-white bones of a human skeleton hung from a metal frame. In another corner was a large biohazard bin that could hold several hundred pounds of dissected cadaver waste—about five bodies’ worth. Everywhere in the bleached walls of the laboratory—the sterile linoleum flooring, the burnished metal of dissection tables, the zippered white bags used to veil the dead, the gleaming instruments used to cut them open—I saw the landscape of a story into which I was being written.

My lab partners and I put on our full-body aprons and white latex gloves, then approached the table that held our cadaver, cocooned still in its polyurethane casing. I leaned and gripped the table’s lip to steady my trembling hands. Touching the table seemed to suggest that I was willing to unzip the body bag. I looked around and saw that other groups had already unwrapped their cadavers and begun the necessary shaving and cleaning of the body. Everyone at table ten was anxious to begin, so I fumbled for the zipper at the rostral end of the bag, where the head lies, and pulled.

The bag opened, revealing a woman’s body: anonymous, feeble, and atrophied, in its eighth or ninth decade. Staring at the table, I felt an uncomfortable awareness of my own body’s temporality, and to distract myself I thought of the sixteenth-century French poets who practiced the art of blason, intimately cataloguing the parts of a woman’s body in verse. I tried to put myself in their position, intent on keeping a mental inventory of the cadaver’s pieces.

First her name: Stella, Italian for “star.” My lab partner offered the appellation, elevating the frail body skyward. Her hair was next, wispy and uneven, absent in patches, her scalp translucent with blue-green vessels snaking just beneath skin. Several moles and polyps peppered her pallid brow. Her skin was desiccated; her face bore a stony countenance, like that of a mountain gradually eroding. Her cheekbones jutted out at angles. Her lips were deeply fissured, enough to reveal the yellow teeth behind them. She smelled of formaldehyde. Her eyelids, not entirely shut, revealed the green of her irises, afloat in a white scleral sea.

It didn’t take long to realize that this distraction wasn’t going to work.

Twelve years have passed since that first day in the anatomy lab, and the image of that anonymous woman beneath the polyurethane veil still grips me. It lingered with me long after her body had been dissected and discarded. To unburden myself, I tried to get to know her better...