The dissection room sat high above the medical school, like a crow’s nest overlooking the business of human anatomy. Today, such a room would probably be hidden away in a basement, but in our day, in Birmingham medical school, it occupied the top floor. The tiled roof had been replaced by large panes of frosted glass, flooding the room with natural light from dawn until dusk.
The reasoning was sound enough. Embalming drained the body of both life and colour, leaving everything a uniform pale grey. Distinguishing muscle from nerve, artery from vein, often required the brightest illumination available. Once the skin had been reflected, the neat diagrams of anatomy textbooks gave way to a confusing landscape of tendons, fat, connective tissue and organs whose purpose was not always immediately obvious. Everything had been altered by preservative. What should have been soft and pliable was now stiff, cold and unwelcoming.
A masterclass in bravado
Our first morning in the dissection room was a masterclass in bravado. We gathered outside the heavy doors, talking louder than usual and laughing a little too readily. The opaque glass panels revealed only vague shadows moving beyond. Someone suggested that the cadavers were stretching after a long night lying still. The joke was weak, but nobody offered a better one. By the time the doors opened, we were all more nervous than we cared to admit.
Inside, the room was tiled almost entirely in white. Along one wall stood large steel sinks and long-handled taps that looked as though they belonged in another century. They were the same ones in operating theatre scrub-up rooms. It was reputed the professor of anatomy used to bathe in them late at night. Every sound echoed from the hard surfaces; even a cough seemed to attract attention.
But it was the specimens that drew the eye. Shelves held large glass jars filled with formalin and containing organs preserved for teaching. Hearts, livers and kidneys floated silently in amber-coloured fluid.
In one corner stood a row of skeletons, articulated and upright, their bones stark against the clinical backdrop. They hung like grim Pelham string puppets, their permanent grins utterly at odds with their macabre surroundings.
Down the centre of the room were the dissecting tables. Each carried a body covered with muslin. Some were surrounded by busy groups of students; others stood untouched, their occupants awaiting their turn.
We lingered awkwardly near the entrance in our spotless white coats. The more experienced students were easy to identify. Their coats carried the marks of previous encounters with anatomy: stains, smudges and hastily scribbled notes. They moved with an enviable air of indifference. In time, we would acquire it too. But on that first morning, we were still very much beginners.
The novelty wore off
Over time, the novelty wore off. Dissection became a grind, a laborious process devoid of glamour. Many of us sought distraction in textbooks, searching for the clinical relevance of the body parts we hacked away at daily. One classmate, while exploring the anal canal, stumbled upon a condition called pruritus ani – intense itching of the nether regions. Her mispronunciation of it as “Pruritis Annie” became the stuff of legend; she was from a state school while the rest of the group were public school boys, where Latin was our second language. From then on, she was “Pruritis Annie,” a nickname shouted down corridors with gleeful abandon, especially by us over-educated pillocks.
By the end of the course, we were veterans ourselves, our coats smeared and splattered, our nerves steeled. But the dissection room remained unchanged: a place of stark light, sharp smells, and indelible memories. It was a crucible of sorts, where we confronted death daily and learned to see it not as an end but as a beginning; a chance to uncover the intricate, miraculous machinery of the human body.
Above all, it was our first rite of passage.
Nowadays, many medical and dental schools don’t do dissection. They don’t know what they are missing.
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