Gross(er) Anatomy

Back in the 80's, I loved the movie "Gross Anatomy".  Okay, okay, I still love it, although I haven't actually seen it in years... I had a big crush on Matthew Modine as the lazy but smart med student, and maybe on some subconscious level that movie fed into my eventual decision to go to medical school.  They had such fun, those first-year students, even when they were studying hard.  The study-all-the-time female lead, in the end, found time for romance with our hero.  And of course there was the professor with the mysterious disease (lupus, naturally) who saw something special in Matthew's character, Joe. 

What was not to love? 


My own gross anatomy course was not quite so humor-and-romance-filled, but we did have a good time.  It was our first class in med school, and took up the first several weeks of the first year.  We actually combined gross anatomy with pathology in an integrated "structure and function" course, but it was basically gross anatomy.

We were divided into groups, and my group of four got along well.  Besides myself, there was the large, black former football player, the tiny, white New York Catholic girl, and.... some guy I really can't remember at all.  Isn't that awful?  We were lucky in our cadaver.  He was a skinny guy, which made for easy dissection.  We didn't have to spend the extra hours clearing fat away from the structures we were meant to identify.  Some groups were not so lucky and spent those lab hours covered in grease as they tried to "melt" the fat. 

Everyone going before had told us the hands and face are the hardest parts, emotionally, to dissect.  These were kept wrapped until we were ready for them.  I agree that it felt odd to cut into them, but not as problematic as I'd thought they would be.  The face, for one thing, was so distorted by death and the tissues so hardened by embalming that it was hard to get a sense of what our guy had really looked like in life.  The hands were a bit more challenging, but mainly because I have a squeamishness about hand/finger pain to begin with.  For our group, the worst part was the arms.  The right arm in particular.  Because there, inked onto his cold, dead skin, was a big, racist Nazi tattoo.  We didn't see this until many weeks into class, when we unwrapped the relevant body part.  It was very hard to reconcile our gratitude for this man's unselfish act of donating his body to science and knowledge with this very visible proof that he was an ignorant bastard, or at least had been at some point in his life. 

What to do with this contradiction?  There wasn't really anything to be done.  Just proceed with our dissection, our education.  But now with an odd puzzlement.  We owed our intimate knowledge of the human body to someone who was quite possibly an abhorrent human being.  Yet he made this incredible donation, his very body, so that we could learn.  This tended to mess with our type-A, med-student predeliction to see the world in black and white. 

Many years later, I would again be challenging that black and white thinking, as I got ready to break free from my career.  I was learning to see shades of gray, and the more I got used to this new way of thinking, the more liberating it became.  I didn't have to use my medical education, or even my residency training, in one particular "approved" way.  I could help people in a different way.  All the shades of gray were possibilities, and I'm working on turning them into color!  I'll spare you the "Wizard of Oz" analogy... except, darn, already went there...

Maybe this racist little man, in his own way, planted the seed all those years ago that everything was not as straightforward as it seemed.  He showed me that people could surprise you, and I went on to surprise myself, and everyone around me.  And for that, I must be grateful, no matter what.