Mining the Portfolio Project

For our most recent reflection about med school, we were asked to write a letter to our best friend describing the experience of being in gross anatomy lab. Here is what I wrote:

Dear best friend,

We are now six labs into Gross Anatomy during our M1 year at UIC, and I can’t say that I love it, though [hopefully] I am learning a lot in the process. Lab occurs every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from around 4-6:30. The lab facilities are located on the seventh floor of the College of Medicine building and sport the gruesome tagline “where the living learn from the dead.” All 185 of us change our clothes in an overheated, formaldehyde-drenched locker room across from the bodies and the changing process is an interesting corollary to the dissection room: hundreds of hot, live bodies as opposed to tens of cold, smelly ones. It vividly contrasts the living and the dead.

Once you enter the dissection laboratories, a rush of chilly corporal preservative smells greets you. The bodies lie on metal tables, enclosed in thick white plastic bags. Each time we go up to dissect, we must unzip our bag, lay out our instruments, and unfold the skin and superficial layers of muscle and bone that we have already looked at. It’s the body as a book, and we must turn past the pages that we have already read.

The actual appearance and tone of the flesh is much different than in real-life—most color has faded to a muted yellow-tan-white and most things that we touch, the lungs notwithstanding, have been firm. The homogeneity helps you to forget that it is a person and also frightens in its distance from personhood. That dichotomy is the hardest split to navigate in the lab. On the one hand, this experience is supposed to teach us to be avid students of human anatomy, dispassionately scrutinizing every nerve and muscle as a potential site of therapy and intervention. You simply cannot think too much about the humanity of a person when your scissors are cutting through their heart muscle. On the opposite end of the spectrum, one must keep the ultimate end goal of helping live people in mind as corpses surround you. It is challenging to hold both of these perspectives in mind (and in body) during a two or three hour dissection.

Finally the dynamics of cutting through a body with a group of people is interesting because the eyes and action of five other people mediate your experience and emotion. There are the overeager, though misdirected scalpel-wielders who jump at the chance to look for a structure embedded in tissue or fat if it means hacking their way in the body. There are the readers, who want to keep the dissection on track by referring constantly to the dissection guidebook. And there are those who carefully and tenderly poke into the body cavities when their turn to hold the knife comes around. I am some combination of the two final lab personalities, and my tablemates display different proportions of each of the dispositions. Thus dissection has its own body politic and share of human drama. This is, I surmise, a nice corollary to the teamwork that we will do as physicians, as each health care professional will bring their skills and attitude “to the table” and somehow or another we will have to learn enough about the patient to treat them.