Gross

The most celebrated course in medical school is of course gross anatomy. In the light of recent findings about the next year's Procedures course, I would beg to differ and throw the pelvic exam right of passage in there, but who am I to upset the entrenched stereotypes. So gross it is, though it really isn't too, for the lack of better term, gross.

It all begins on the first day of lab. Yes, it's my blog and I get to state the obvious. Anyways. You get your notes, and in the excitement of the whole thing, actually read them the day ahead. Come to lab prepared, dressed in your blue or green scrubs (you picked during second week, remember?), and dive in. Pretty much like that. You first listen to a series of lectures on respect for the people who donated their bodies, on how a single off-color remark will get you booted from med school, and how you'd better be keeping up with your lab. You seriously ponder donating your own body to science. You wonder about the people who were once alive, and now will be the subjects of your first clumsy cuts. You ponder the human condition. But then the attention bell rings, quiets down the room, and the anticlimax is delivered: "Dont' forget the purple gloves! Mandatory once you're in the lab, off when you're in the atrium! They come in 3 comfortable sizes." By the time you pick up your scalpel, you think that the only course in medical school is gross anatomy. Well there are two others, and one of them counts for 10 credits, while gross is only 8. Hush, the cadaver corps don't want you to know that.

So it all begins with somewhat of a sense of awe. You're surrounded by dead people, there is a bona fide priest who says a brief nondenominational prayer, a Bible (New Testament to be precise, but the laid-back Jewish students aren't burning the lab director in effigy) on one of the shelves, there are people feeling weak, there are tiles on the walls and the floor, and there are 20+ stainless steel containers, henceforth known as "tables," with preserved bodies in plastic bags.

Each container has 1 bagged cadaver, 1 box of tools, and 1 set of grease copies of lab manuals, Grant's anatomy book, and Grant's dissector book. Now, the preservative used is a formalin solution (mostly ethanol), so the smell isn't as obnoxious as I remember it from my days as a young whipper snapper dissecting formaldehyde-dipped frogs in high-school bio. We begin by cutting the bag open and poking holes in the bottom to drain the solution. The bravest souls flip the cadaver on his stomach, and the bravest of the bravest makes the first incision with the scalpel. Once the appropriate incisions are made (down the spine and to the sides), you scrape the fascia (connective tissue between skin and muscle) away as the skin is being peeled back. Eventually everyone joins in, and we take turns peeling the skin back. We see our first muscles. We feel like we're the first people to land on Mars...Publish Post