Listen and subscribe on , , and so you don't miss the next one. And if you like what you hear, a five-star rating goes a long way in helping us spread the word!
This story is from the Anamnesis episode called Got Your Back and starts at 17:41 on the podcast. This story is told by , a urologist primarily located in San Antonio.
I think it's fair to say I capture the zeitgeist of first-year medical students everywhere when I say the class where I'm most excited about is anatomy lab. It is the class that makes us feel like we are finally becoming real doctors. Tours during medical school admissions interviews always include the anatomy lab, and most of the time it is found in a dark basement.
This evokes memories of the ancient anatomists, fleeing from religious zealots, risking being burned at the stake for obtaining materials for their dissection, but the anatomy lab in Old Red in Galveston was light and airy and on the top floor. You could look out on the Gulf of Mexico when your neck got sore from craning over the side of the tank. The walls were surrounded by shelves containing jars of weird anatomic variants saved by our professors over the century and a half of teaching first-year med students.
Cadaver-Based Bond
The day the four of us met was hot and sticky, a typical Galveston day in August. We came to the anatomy lab that day in our shorts and T-shirts and soon learned it was inappropriate attire for the work ahead of us.
It's easy to identify first-year med students by the unmistakable stench of formalin that permeates their clothing. The four of us met that day, John and Mark on one side of the tank and Jeff and I on the other side.
We soon became friends during the long hours spent on dissections and discussions of what we were finding. We learned about each other's past and how we had come to choose medicine. We learned what motivated one another. We learned about past loves and successes and failures. It's easy to become fast friends in this foxhole experience and we did.
At home, this tenacious smell caused my wife, Leslie, to develop a strange ritual on arrival. I had to strip naked, down to my skivvies and below, and take a shower long enough to impact the stench before I was allowed to enter our home.
I don't blame her at all. I don't think the smell ever completely got off me, and I think she felt that maybe she was sleeping next to a cadaver, too.
We named our cadaver Melba. By her munificence, we learned about the intricacies of human anatomy. She was a 60-year-old white female who had died of an MI. That is all we knew of her. We knew nothing about her past life, her loves, her experiences, or anything else about her. She was this four-limbed creature that we were to dissect in order to learn about the human body.
Our amazement grew as we dissected layer underneath layer and structure within structure. The work was tedious and caution ruled, lest we brutally tear through some essential structure and lose the lesson for the day. But this was also due to reverence for the gift that Melba had bestowed on us.
Those of us who wanted to do surgery were a little more focused on the area we intended to operate on in the future, but nonetheless, we all needed to learn about organ systems and their interactions.
Sorry, Melba
We had an impromptu Halloween party where we posed with Melba and the various jars of anatomy parts in this macabre evening that seemed straight out of a cheap Hollywood film. Why not? Isn't that what medical students everywhere do? Spend their freshman year Halloween night in the anatomy lab?
We never heard anything from our professors and I suspect it was because they had the same sense of humor at large over many years. We suppose that Melba would go along with the joke, too, if she were alive. I don't guess there is a word for ascribing characteristics of the living on the dead, but we assumed a lot about Melba and what she may have been like, including whether or not her sense of humor would have permitted such an activity.
Something internally shifted for me during the second half of the year, the semester devoted to neuroanatomy -- a seismic shift. As we dissected her brain, thoughts of her thoughts and what that brain may have been producing during her lifetime filled me with wonder.
The fact you could touch a segment of her brain and produce a movement made me look at her hand, for example, and wait to see if it would move, even though I knew her brain or her hand had been dead for over two years preserved in formalin. There was this intense knowing that there had to be a divine being behind this miraculous design. This could be no accident.
My background in evolution and the hard sciences was not to be denied, but that background had turned me into an agnostic, something with which I was quite unfamiliar. A Catholic upbringing had taught me in catechism where we all came from, and that simplistic religious structure was appealing to me for years.
I was sure, however, that there had been a spirit that had been in this mind, and it had escaped at one time. It defined her in a way that we could not despite our deepest and most thorough dissections, so it makes me sad we had used Melba as a prop during our Halloween party.
I have learned over the years that respect for all things living and dead must be pre-eminent. We've all made fumbling attempts as clinicians at explaining the inexplicable with our so-called best scientific minds, and I know it is very likely that spirit that dwells within us is channeling the best of our nature, helping the healing process along.
If we are to become healers in the truest sense of that profession, we must honor all the facets of being human, mind, body, and spirit. Far from hard science making me a skeptic, it has made me a believer. A believer in body, mind, and spirit.
I often wonder what happened to the other trio of my quartet. I kept up with Jeff for many years, but I lost track of John and Mark. I sometimes wonder if they took away from their side of the tank and Melba the same lessons I did, much, much more than the anatomy we learned.
Other stories in the Got Your Back episode: Patient Jekyll, Mr. Hyde and Over Her Dead Body
Other stories from the Got Your Back episode: Patient Jekyll, Mr. Hyde and From Paralysis to Pen Pal
Want to share your story? Read the Anamnesis Storyteller Tip Sheet and when you're ready, apply here!