The Last Cut Is The Deepest: My Take On Human Dissection

Anonymous

DISCLAIMER: This is a take about human dissection, the act of cutting open the body to study the internal parts. Aside from one picture of the human brain, the images used are of dissection tools or from anatomy resources. Some of the details are graphic in nature so read at your own discretion. I've described, informally, my own experience.

The Last Cut Is The Deepest: My Take On Human Dissection

Dissection is a rite of passage for medical students.

Before we even start classes, we get to put on our white coats and say the Hippocratic Oath...but until we cut into another human being, none of it feels real. After a few months of standard biochemistry, we begin the Human Anatomy block. We spend two months dissecting a person apart, trying to unravel the workings of the human body.

The first day, the lab technicians gave each of us a box of gloves, protective eyewear, a lab coat, and a kit that contained three scalpels, a pair of forceps, two pairs of scissors, and a hemostat (basically a scissor which you can lock into place- excellent for establishing grip). Walking into the anatomy lab felt surreal. There were about fifty metal tables sprawled across two rooms, each with a cadaver lying on the surface. The cadavers themselves were wrapped in long sea green towels and then further wrapped in plastic. The sight of all those mummy-like bodies along with the accompanying smell was almost too much to handle. I can still remember meeting my lab group for the first time, all of us awkwardly glancing at each other, wondering who would start unwrapping our cadaver. Me and this other girl started slowly pulling the plastic off. Immediately, a wave of this sickly chemical smell hit us and both of us stared at each other, wondering what the hell we had gotten ourselves into. But we kept going.

As we bunched the plastic by our cadaver's feet, the guys started pulling the towel off the body, finally revealing her face. The other girl started to panic and backed up a few steps and I quickly covered up our cadaver's face with some paper towels. This was the custom. Our anatomy professors had warned us earlier that day that seeing the cadaver's face for the first time would be jarring, distressing even. The course had been structured so that we would only ever have to dissect the head at the end of the block, when hopefully, we would all be desensitized enough to be able to get through it. Truthfully, I had been hoping for a male cadaver because I had thought that it would be easier to cut into a body that was unlike my own.

The Last Cut Is The Deepest: My Take On Human Dissection

That first day, all we did was skin her. Before we started, I felt compelled to pray for her, even though she was already dead. I don't know anything about the afterlife...but I certainly hope she wasn't around to see what we did to her body. The lab manual had stated that our task was to skin her arms and legs, identify fascia (fat), and then scrape off the fascia to get to the muscles. She was a petite woman with exceptionally thin arms. She had dark hair, which had been shaved down to the scalp. I think what disturbed me the most were her hands. She had died six months ago- all of the cadavers had. They had been going through a preserving process for half a year, laying in the morgue until it was time for us to meet them. With new blades on our scalpels and our hemostats in hand, we began to take her skin off. We worked in silence, simultaneously enthralled and horrified by how easily we had begun to deconstruct another human being.

Within an hour, we had piles of skin on the table, and a thin layer of pearly fascia was exposed. By the next hour, the fascia, persistent as it was, was mostly gone. We quickly learned that the scalpel was a bit useless when it came to removing fat- instead, using the forceps to pick away at it was the best technique. We made many mistakes that day too. I accidentally sliced through an artery. Someone else cut right through a tendon. She was such a petite woman, we wondered if she was missing some muscles too. One of the lab assistants came by and expertly dissected out the missing muscles, which had been pressed tightly into another muscle, almost becoming attached to it. Using his gloved fingers, he pulled at the muscles in her arm, roughly separating them, ripping through veins and residual fascia. The force of his movements caused her fingers to tap against the table. Again, my lab group and I had a silent conversation with our eyes- we were enthralled and horrified once more.

The Last Cut Is The Deepest: My Take On Human Dissection

After we felt we had identified everything we were supposed to, we began to clean up. I gathered up piles of skin and muscle in my hands and threw them in the trash. It was odd to see piles of other people's skin and tissue in there already. We sprayed her with an anti-fungal spray which was supposed to keep her hydrated and fungus-free. Then we wrapped her up in the sea green towel once more, and finally the plastic. Despite wearing gloves and washing my hands with hot water and soap, the smell of the cadaver did not leave.


Sleeping that night was...tough. I kept thinking about what we had done to her body. I think her face and hands got to me the most. Her nails were beautifully manicured and had been painted silver. This was clearly a woman who cared about her appearance, who took the time to get her nails done. How did she get on our table? How was she convinced to donate her body to science? How did she die? What was her family like? Did they know what was happening to her? A lot of questions ran through my head that night and I had to keep the lights on. I’d fall asleep every 30 minutes or so, waking up with my heart pounding, thinking she was standing over me.

The Last Cut Is The Deepest: My Take On Human Dissection

Over the next few weeks, it became easier and easier to cut into her. I grabbed her ankles, the others grabbed her neck and arms and we flipped her onto her front. Her feet had been poorly preserved and most of the soles of her feet came off in my hands. I put my goggles on, took a chisel and mallet and broke her spine. I can still remember that disturbingly satisfying crunch of bone breaking. Using pliers, I tore her vertebra away to expose her spinal cord, which was a thing of beauty. Shiny, sleek, covered in this mother-of-pearl material. One of the lab assistants said that our body had a textbook spinal cord and we felt a strange sense of pride when other groups came over to our table to check her out.


In just a few weeks, we were cutting into her abdomen. A thick sheet of bright yellow connective tissue covered her organs. We lifted the peritoneum to expose the large intestine, the stomach, and other organs. We searched in vain for her appendix, finally concluding that she probably had had it removed. It was around this time that I began to take some strolls around the lab. Some bodies were quite heavy and people blunted their scalpels cutting away at the extra fascia. Other bodies were so badly preserved that the organs had congealed into a mass of black and burgundy, accompanied by the stench of unfettered decomposition. Times like that, I felt lucky.


Having gone through her back, her arms, legs, and abdomen...her chest was next. In order to identify the pectoralis muscles, we needed to cut off her breasts. The guys in my group felt a bit awkward about this, leaving me and the other girl to handle it. I started on her left side, using the scalpel to make smooth lateral incisions from the top of her breast. The scalpel glided through the fascia easily and in moments I had her breast in the palm of my hand. I handed it to one of the guys to throw out and I remember him just staring at it as it lay on his palm. I watched him place it in that trash and "place" is really the only way to phrase it. Somehow, it felt more serious than all the skin and muscle we had tossed away carelessly.

The Last Cut Is The Deepest: My Take On Human Dissection

To get to her heart, we needed to remove her rib cage. I fit the mouth of the pliers around each rib, snapping through it. Then, I twisted my wrist sharply until I heard that crunch, knowing that I fully severed the rib. After finishing the left side, I handed the pliers to one of the guys and waited for him to finish the right side. Together, we lifted her rib cage away from her chest, finally exposing her lungs and heart. After cutting through the base of her lungs, we lay them out on a few pieces of paper towel to better see the area where all the arteries, veins, and bronchi enter the lungs. Removing her heart took a few minutes because of the massive arteries and veins attached to it. We passed her heart around, amazed by how small, light and... rubbery it was. We opened up the chambers of heart crudely and incorrectly, due to our inexperience. We discovered metal wiring in one of the chambers- she had had a pacemaker implanted. The wiring and scar tissue rendered her heart unusable and so we had to rely other groups’ dissections to learn the anatomy.

The Last Cut Is The Deepest: My Take On Human Dissection

One Monday, we discovered that part of her head missing. Earlier that day, the lab assistants had cut through the top of her head and had removed her brain. The top of her skull was resting on top of a white bucket which contained her brain. It's a disconcerting thing, seeing a brain, sitting at the bottom of a bucket. Putting my hands into that bucket felt awful. The liquid was really cold and her brain was colder. It was slippery and a bit jiggly, but quite beautiful. The vasculature was perfectly preserved and we could easily identify the Circle of Willis, a connection of arteries which supplies much of the brain. When touring the lab, I came across one brain where all the vasculature looked...destroyed, blackened, messy. You don’t need a background in medicine to know that something terrible had happened there. One of the lab assistants told me that that cadaver’s cause of death was a subdural hemorrhage. Not a pleasant way to go.

The last two weeks of Human Anatomy were the by far the toughest. Hiding her face with paper towels was no longer an option. By that time, her skin had become quite desiccated and had taken on this dark tannish orange color. She looked even thinner than before. The muscles of her body hung loosely away from her bones because of our exploration of her. The last things we had to work on were her face and her cranium. Skinning her face was quite challenging. She was so petite, it was difficult to get a grip on her skin using the hemostat. Only two of us could work on her face at a time and it was a painstaking process. At one point, I was taking the skin off of her cheeks and accidentally poked her eyeball down into the socket. I froze up for a second, trying to process that I had literally depressed her eye into her cranium. I laughed it off with my lab group, because...there was nothing else to do. Internally, I felt like I had done something unforgivable. I still don’t know why that moment tripped me up instead of all the other hundred ways we had defiled her.

The Last Cut Is The Deepest: My Take On Human Dissection

When it came to dissecting the inner facial structures, people stopped coming to lab. I remember getting text messages from half my group, telling me that they were sorry, but they didn’t want to participate in this part of the dissection. That last day, each group was given a hand saw. Our task was to expose the nasal turbinates, the oral cavity, and the pharynx. This was a one-person job. Unsurprisingly, nobody wanted to do it. I really didn’t want to do it either, but it had to get done. We put on our goggles, propped her neck up on a wooden block and the guys held her shoulders in place. I stood behind the head of the table and placed the hand saw at the midpoint of her skull and started sawing.

It was rough. Pieces of bone flew all over the place. The guys struggled to hold her down since the muscles of her shoulders were falling apart and one side had been dislocated. I kept going until I went beyond the skull and into the soft flesh of her face, through her nose, through her tongue. I struggled to get the hand saw through her jaw, but that too eventually gave way. I kept going until her face was split in two, all the way down her neck. The two halves of her head lay open like a book. She wasn’t a person anymore. She was mangled, a decaying pile of muscle and bone. By stripping her of her face, she stopped being a real person. And we had stopped being afraid.


Two weeks later, we had our final exam. Afterwards, I went back into lab to get my kit so that I could return it to the lab technicians. For the first time, I was completely alone in lab. There were fifty uncovered, decomposing cadavers. Fifty unseeing, unspeaking, unthinking souls. They would each be packed up and sent to a crematorium, their ashes to be returned to their families. And the cycle would repeat, with new cadavers and new students.

The Last Cut Is The Deepest: My Take On Human Dissection
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