[Binaural frequencies play and then fade]
In a Jar.
[A car door shuts]
On March 18th I made a trip to Galveston, Texas, to view one of the state’s most unique archives: the Keiller Collection at the University of Texas, Medical Branch.
[The car begins driving]
The Keiller Collection is something like a window into the history of medical education in the United States at the turn of the 20thcentury—a history that is shared by Western-styled medical schools across the globe.
[The sound of a heavy hermetically sealed door opening plays]
And inside locked room in an old dissection laboratory on the top floor of UTMB’s first building—a preposterous Romanesque revival castle known as “Old Red”—the collection is presented to me by its guardian, Dr. Paula Summerly.
[The sounds of a laboratory play softly]
From floor to ceiling the room is packed with glass jars of all different sizes; some sit in rows on metal office racks, others, burdened by their sheer size weight, sit on the floor. The collection used to be larger, Dr. Summerly tells me. Initially my eyes are fixed on her—I’m too nervous to engage with the bodies in the jars.
[A jar smashes; drawing can be heard]
My first experience with the Keiller collection was purely digital. Months ago I reproduced an anatomical drawing of the human calf that was originally made by a student at UTMB in the thirties. And as I was recreating her work, I struggled to imagine what could’ve been going through her mind as she stood beside the dissection table.
[Writing with a pencil]
As I would find out later, it was common practice for medical students to base their anatomical drawings on medical textbooks and not on “live” dissections. But that didn’t cause my curiosity to subside—anatomical dissection was, and continues to be part of medical education—someone was doing the cutting. (1),(2)
[Metal slice sound effect]
At Yale University, the Director of Anatomy, Lawrence Rizzolo, is one of the people that does the cutting. In an article written by him, he submits that the minds of medical students in the dissection lab are caught somewhere between scholarly curiosity and empathetic horror. (3)
[Someone gasps; a heartbeat can be heard]
He contends that value of anatomical dissection in medical education isn’t just to teach anatomy—especially when virtual teaching tools abound—he says that its pedagogical value is also its ability to push future doctors to confront life and death. To consider the human in the body.
[Silence, followed by the beeping of an ECG]
It seemed impossible that Dr. Rizzolo could be the first the first to propose this forwardly humanist use of anatomical dissection.
[The sound of a book being thumbed through is heard; renaissance music plays]
But as it turns out—he may have been, at least, in the Western medical tradition. The practice of anatomical dissection, originating in Ancient Greece, wound its way through Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, gathering innovations in later centuries as the momentum of scientific inquiry grabbed hold of apparently “objective” bodily knowledge. And by the time Western medical education made it to America, Japan, and China—it was based on only a handful of traditions from Scotland and Germany. (4)(5)(6)
[The sound of the book closing]
And in none of the scholarship that I encountered about the history of medical education in those places was “humanism” a topic of concern. The intersection between humanism and anatomical dissection—as far as I was able to tell—was something personal. Felt, but unspoken by medical students China…and undoubtedly elsewhere too.
[The sounds of the laboratory fades back in]
Back in the room of jars, I have gotten up the nerve to look at the specimens themselves. There is one that I neglected on purpose, at first. I knew that I would need to acquaint myself with some of the other, smaller specimens first—to desensitize myself. And then I decided it was time to meet him.
[The laboratory sounds have faded back out; the sound of a curtain being drawn plays; laboratory sounds resume]
In one of the largest jars on the floor by the wall is fully one half of a grown man, fixed in solution from the waist up. His insides, on full display, are artfully dyed blue and red and he stares, with his one remaining eye, at the wall. He is both unmistakably human, and insurmountably dead, and I am overwhelmed by the feeling that I’ve seen him some place before.
[The sound of an urban street plays]
Maybe it was somewhere in the city?
[The urban sounds fade; the sounds of a supermarket are heard]
Maybe it was at the store?
[Silence]
But here he is now, just in front of me—under water like a fish.
Notes
[1] Rizzolo, Lawrence J. “Human Dissection: An Approach to Interweaving the Traditional and Humanistic Goals of Medical Education.”
[2] Kelly, J. K. “A Suggestion Towards the Improvement of the Medical Curriculum.”
[3] Rizzolo 2002
[4] Elizondo-Omaña, Rodrigo E., et al. “Dissection as a Teaching Tool: Past, Present, and Future.”
[5] Luesink, David. “Anatomy and the Reconfiguration of Life and Death in Republican China.”
[6] Sakai, Tatsuo. “Historical development of modern anatomy education in Japan”
Works Cited
Elizondo-Omaña, Rodrigo E., et al. “Dissection as a Teaching Tool: Past, Present, and Future.” The Anatomical Record Part B: The New Anatomist, vol. 285B, no. 1, 2005, pp. 11–15., doi:10.1002/ar.b.20070.
Kelly, J. K. “A Suggestion Towards the Improvement of the Medical Curriculum.” Glasgow Medical Journal, vol. 30, no. 6, 1888, pp. 463–467., www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5924182/.
Luesink, David. “Anatomy and the Reconfiguration of Life and Death in Republican China.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 76, no. 4, 2017, pp. 1009–1034., doi:10.1017/s0021911817000845.
Rizzolo, Lawrence J. “Human Dissection: An Approach to Interweaving the Traditional and Humanistic Goals of Medical Education.” The Anatomical Record, vol. 269, no. 6, 2002, pp. 242–248., doi:10.1002/ar.10188.
Sakai, Tatsuo. “Historical development of modern anatomy education in Japan.” Nihon ishigaku zasshi. [Journal of Japanese history of medicine] vol. 56,1 (2010): 3-23.