Anatomy lab puts students in place




Rachel Pearson, who grew up in Port Aransas, is now an MD/PhD student at the UT Medical Branch in Galveston. Her column appears almost regularly in the South Jetty. Contact her at rachelmpearson@gmail.net.

Rachel Pearson, who grew up in Port Aransas, is now an MD/PhD student at the UT Medical Branch in Galveston. Her column appears almost regularly in the South Jetty. Contact her at rachelmpearson@gmail.net.


Sometimes in anatomy lab, I felt that I saw myself in the cadaver. It was curious.

It began when I saw the fossa ovale, a smooth spot on the inner wall of the heart that marks where a hole shunted blood past my cadaver’s lungs before she was born.

It’s a bit of her past, from before she grew up and lived, before she was diagnosed with with Alzheimer’s, before her face grew so thin, long before she died and was placed into my amateur hands.

I would like to say she was placed under my care, but I couldn’t say I took care of her. I learned from her. I kept her body moist while we were dissecting, and fended off inappropriate jokes about her.

Sometimes I found myself patting her arm. But she was, I think, nothing like a patient.

The fact of the Alzheimer’s tugged at me, too. My grandfather died of Alzheimer’s, so I was curious to see her brain. Would it show physical signs of the disease? Would my grandfather’s brain have been like hers?

Because Alzheimer’s has a genetic component (as well as environmental and unknown causes), she made me think about my own brain. Could plaques be aggregating in my own brain, even now? Will what happened to her happen to me?

Or my parents?

It is much easier, I found, to ponder one’s own death than the deaths of the people you love.

We switched cadavers at mid-semester, so I ended up dissecting a different brain. It was surprisingly solid, and gray, and heavy, and cool. You can see the nerves coming out the bottom and passing through tiny holes in the base of the skull. Some of the nerves are thinner than fishing line, and some are as thick as a thumb.

I felt no particular connection to that brain—by the time I met that cadaver, he was already a mess. Even so, it was wondrous to see the organ that makes us.

On a radiograph, I saw the pineal gland glow white at the back of the skull, near where the spinal cord comes up. The French philosopher Descartes thought the pineal gland was the seat of the soul. He thought the soul acted directly on the pineal gland, moving it back and forth and controlling the flow of the fluid that surrounds your brain. That flow caused moods and other soul-events.

Even though I do not believe that the human soul rests in the pineal gland, I was glad to see it blink so brightly among the other structures of the brain. Descartes would’ve liked that.

I worried about Peggy. Were the people dissecting her now being kind to her? What does it mean to be kind to a cadaver whose body you ultimately reduce to a pile of chop? What does it mean to be respectful when we desecrate these bodies so completely?

My friend Katie told me that anatomy lab puts medical students in our place: It makes us start out owing something, something we can never repay—the use of a body and the awesome lessons from it—and obligates us to use those lessons properly. That’s a comforting way of looking at it, for me.

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