Halvsies

The cadaver looked different today. The body shape was off, discontinuous, more lumpy than usual under the concealing shroud. The revelatory moment was a bit beyond surreal, a sheet pulled balk to reveal a dismembered body that had been, at some point in the day before, cut nearly precisely in half. A separated pair of legs stared longingly up at the trunk and upper body, intestines and spinal cords split asunder by a gap they had never known.

We hadn't performed the cut, a rare usurpation of our anatomists rights. We had left a body mostly intact, organs separated here and there, but with everything in its right place. We returned to find our work rudely ripped apart, the neat lines of our abdominal dissection shredded by the work of a gigantic saw. It was abrupt for us, a surprise.

Snake's final remaining touch of humanity had been taken, leaving only a disparate leg and torso combo, a value pack from the world's most disturbing store. It was done so we could study the legs and the pelvic girdle more completely, so we could understand the inside of our own hips. Someone had come into the lab, wielding the scientific equivalent of a chain-saw on fifty dead bodies. Someone does this every year.

Testicular Fortitude

My partner holds the testicles out, moving aside the withered penis with the back of her hand. She cuts into the scrotum, dispassionately revealing nothing. We goggled a bit at the empty vessel, not understanding if this was, perhaps, the way the testicles were supposed to look. She tries the other one, again failing to discover anything remotely ball-like inhabiting the folds of skin. Snake was, at some point, the victim of testicular cancer. I finally felt, in that moment, the force of the myriad of postmortem humiliations that snake had experienced to be with us in that lab.

Throughout the entire anatomy lab, there was no region most of the male students were more loath to slice into than the genitals. In a moment of freudian solidarity, the vast majority of us passed on the honor of that dissection to our female classmates, a shared moment of 100 sympathetic pangs in our own equipment, 100 disturbing visions of emasculation. We got over it, as we were made to get over any number of hang ups, but it was a remarkably visceral experience in social psychology. For reasons both genetic and social, a cornerstone of male psyche rests squarely and oddly on the status of our genitals. The idea of emasculation seems the ultimate pain and humiliation, an injury with a scope beyond the biological damage entailed. When we sliced open Snake, revealing the damage done to his sex organs, I finally felt true empathy with the man we had sliced, fairly literally, into pieces.

How powerful is the force of depersonalization, that I, and all students, can literally take knife to flesh with barely the most fleeting of thoughts? We came out of lab each day, reeking of death, and complaining only of the smell. We dispassionately held up the things that made 50 fellow human beings exist, thinking only of the taxonomy. Yet, for myself, and 99 other guys in my class, this one region, this one more cut, one more dissection, was the one that hit home.

That, I must say, is bizarre.

Braincase

I've got the chisel and hammer in my gloved hands, fidgeting with each out of boredom. The anatomy lab is sparkling and nauseating as usual, the gleam of light off chrome given the lie by the pervasive smell of preservatives and sanitized death. We've been here so often by now that the disturbing juxtaposition no longer offends or impacts. The brain is a marvelous thing, adjusting us to our surroundings no matter how strange or unpleasant.

One of my partners holds the saw, the miraculous vibrating serrated edge that somehow can only cut tough material. Another is perched over Snake's head, scraping off those last tenacious bits of fascia from the top of the skull. We had removed the skin the day before, the sterile impersonation of a scalping done quickly and imperfectly, a casualty of dull scalpel blades. We have to remove the leftover soft bits so that the miracle saw can do its work, chopping swiftly and precisely through the skull, yet leaving the internal brain and dura intact.

The girl with the saw moves up to Snake's head, and turns it on. A high pitched buzzing fills the room, and as she lowers the saw to the skull, a small burst of bone dust and smoke plumes upward, bits of burning hydroxyapatite creating another odor in a nostril already at standing room only capacity. She moves awkwardly around the dome of the skull, creating a continuous separation. Now its my turn, and I move in with the hammer and chisel. I place the chisel in newly generated space in the bone, and use it to lever the skull upwards. There is a pop, and the bone falls off, a ragged skull cap in the most literal sense.

The brain is not yet exposed, still wrapped in a covering of thick fibrous tissue. In a live person, the skull would be full of fluid, a protective cushioning and gravity negating layer designed to protect an organ nearly devoid of strong structural components from its own weight. With Snake, there is barely any drainage as we section the dura, revealing at last the former seat of his personality. I take my chisel and i move it down the front of the skull, moving it in a lazy arc to rupture all the attachment points, where his cranial nerves used to tell his face who it was. I use the chisel to sever the brainstem, and with another liquid pop, the brain comes loose.

I reach a hand into a human skull, ignoring the unreal implications of my action, and pull out his brain, a cacophony of most unseemly squishing noises serving in lieu of a drumroll. I am holding the seat of a man's being in my hands, inspecting it incredulously, wondering how this situation just came to pass. The contents of my hand seem such a small thing to loom so large. I remove the falx cerebri from between the cerebral hemispheres, and toss it aside into the debris bin. We set the brain aside, leaving it afloat in its own bath of chemicals, waiting patiently for a neurology lab months away. Turning back to the empty skull, a dissected face staring at us with an empty grin, we dive right back in, searching for the cranial nerves in a space that once held a man's soul.

Snake

You spend a lot of time with your cadaver that first year of school. Which is weird, when you think about it. You build your day around anatomy lab, hours spent in a brightly lit room, reeking of formaldehyde. You huddle around this guy, a generous man who donated his body to the advancement of your knowledge, marveling at the structures inside, and tsk-tsking at his imperfections.

We named him (most groups do). It only seems right. You spend so much time with them, refer to them in so many ways. You explore their bodies in ways that nobody ever does, (or can without significant jail time) and a partner in that kind of intimacy deserves an appellation. His salient feature, his key identifier, was the giant chinese dragon tattoo on his right arm. Bright and colorful, the tattoo had survived the chemical fading of the rest of his skin, the forced de-vivification necessary to prevent decay. It stood there, immediately jumping out to us as we began the process of opening up the arms. He must have had it for years, we assumed, as it had sagged a bit from what must have been a once glorious presentation.

That first week we named him Snake. And when the time came, we kept the tattoo intact, keeping it with him in the the chrome case of preservatives. It would have been a shame to do anything else.

The First Cut

The strangest thing about walking into a room of 50 dead people is how completely not strange it was. A bustling crowd of twenty-somethings enters the room, gathering four or five to a corpse and staring at the bulging sheets with a curiosity that can only be described (with a cringe) as morbid. We had heard talks, hours of talks. This is our first patient, they told us. Treat them with respect. We had listened seriously, reveled in the concept of receiving such a gift.

We remove the sheets, exposing the skin of the chest to our prying eyes. It was grey, with the consistency of cold wax, wrinkled and molded into sharp creases by the processing these donor's had endured in order to be with us on this bright and sunny day. We sit there, clinically eying the rubberized flesh of one of our former compatriots on this earth, wondering who was going to open up the newly purchased dissection kit and take the first whack at our patient.

I'll do it, I think, and as I open my mouth a small girl grabs the scalpel, and tentatively slices the congealed flesh under the nipple. She is trying to expose the pectoralis major, and with the imperfect confidence of a newly minted anatomist, she is being defeated by her care for the integrity of the structures. She sits there, delicately peeling back layers of fascia and fat, engrossed in the act of perfect invasion we have all conspired to create.

A proctor walks by, and laughs. At this rate, she says, we will be here all day. She grabs the knife, and slices deep. Reaching in with her tools, she roughly separates the skin and fascia from the chest muscles, and slices off the insertion point of the pec major. She holds up her prize, greasy and covered in bits of what had once been, as Mr. Heston said, People. She holds up the muscle from our first patient, for all the world to see.

Start skinning the arm, she says. So we do.