Dissection
Medical students are forced to change their perceptions of the dead. There is a human instinct that must be overcome to stick knives and fingers into human flesh
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By Meehan Crist
The face lies exposed under fluorescent lights as expert hands place the edge of a serrated blade against its forehead. (Do they call it forehead in the dissection lab? The word is too familiar, too human. In the lab, body becomes cadaver. And yet the students assign names: Eve, Johnny, Marco. The dead are stripped of identity somewhere between donation and distribution, then given new identities over the course of a semester of cutting. There is intimacy in dissection.) The cadaver rocks back and forth on the table. The sound of metal against bone. Dust flying.
The cadaver is turned over to reveal the back of the head so the blade can continue the cut, like a kitchen knife working around the pit of a stubborn avocado. The face is pressed against the table (oh god, the nose!) as the white-coated professor leans his weight into the work. It’s not easy to saw through bone, even the few millimeters of the human skull.
I hold my breath as the top of the skull is removed. Skullcap comes to mind. The spinal cord is snipped and gloved hands reach in to grasp the wrinkled gray meat of the brain.
I long to hold a human brain in my hands, to know the weight of it. For years I have studied the organ at a remove: in theory, drawing, and photograph. It started with popular-science books and glossy magazine articles, which led to the more rarefied world of scientific papers and journals, dense texts not meant for communication of ideas so much as proclamation of data, littered nonetheless with an accidental poetry that is perhaps inescapable when the subject matter is the meat of the human mind. I started going to conferences and filling notebooks. I visited research labs where eager graduate students slid subjects into million-dollar scanners that boomed and clanged like garbage-can marching bands while rendering technicolor images of neural activity. Curiosity long ago gave way to obsession. But the physical object of the brain itself remains elusive. None of this is easy to explain, but among the forms on the stainless-steel…
