What Beautiful Anatomy You Have

Med school marches onward, seemingly oblivious to the poor souls it's dragging with it. Realistically, we are a boiler, gradually building up pressure until that first exam hits and we burst out the safety release valve. That will be an interesting day for sure.

This week was notable for our first anatomy dissection. Every med school I know of has a cadaver dissection as part of the course, the point being to help us learn anatomy. To say it is an odd experience is downplaying it rather substantially. For one, death is not a topic that is addressed in casual conversation, thus evoking some anxious feelings when it is presented in such an explicit form. Additionally, cutting apart the flesh of the deceased is surreal. Generally, we tend to discourage stabbing other humans with scalpels and scissors and other pointy objects. Making cuts into the body requires you to fight back against decades of rule governed behavior, and even when you do, you still get the feeling that something is amiss. Yet, I certainly wouldn't pass up the opportunity to do dissections, and I know my classmates feel the same way.

Even though we've only had one dissection (two more this week; not sure what we did to earn this punishment), I've already learned a great deal. We started with the back because the muscles are large and it's relatively difficult to screw it up. To get to the good stuff however, required several hours of removing fat from the body spaces. Our body, unfortunately, is quite obese, which essentially acts to increase the amount of time it takes us to remove unimportant parts and ramps up the difficulty in defining the stuff we do want to keep. The other problem with dissection is that most anatomy atlases are color coded. This is great for learning initially, but completely useless for the cadaver. Normal living tissue retains some of its color, but the cadavers are mostly shades of gray. And since part of our grade comes from identifying structures on cadavers, it's kind of a big deal to know what areas you are dealing with.

I'm going to try to touch on some non-med school related topics this week, but we'll see how that actually goes. Now that we're done with orientation, our schedule is a little more regular. Apparently things don't really die down until the spring semester though, so I'm SOL at the moment. Is it too late to change to business school?