By Ragini Bhadula
Cadaver. Function: Noun. Etymology: Latin from cadere, to fall. Definition: a dead body, especially one intended for dissection.
Cadaver. A thing to take apart and put back together, like the toaster your mom couldn’t get to work anymore or the old car in your grandfather’s garage that he let you disassemble. But it’s a human body, someone lived in this, you keep thinking, scalpel in hand, nose wrinkled at the globs of quivering yellow gunk you pull off. And the more you cut, the more definitions that are added. Optic nerve, adductor longus, haustra, the list grows longer, and the body under your knife grows smaller, until it disappears all together. And then it’s nothing more than desiccated leather attached to bone shard, visceral gunk with missing parts. Faces, hands, feet, human bits, slowly eaten away by methodical carving, until finally what you see could be anything and no one…so how is it that we retain our compassion amidst this dehumanizing gluttony of flesh?
As medical students, we are constantly being reminded to be mindful of the humanity of patients, as if we ourselves have forgotten what it is to be human. Sometimes, it seems that as future physicians we are expected to have no emotional attachment to our patients, thus in turn we are taught how to appear caring in lectures and workshops. But a more false assumption could not be made, for not one of us who has spent hour upon hour, slicing away at fingers and scalps can forget the thrill and horror of how easily that scalpel slit through skin. That first cut. How readily our nerves and bones and muscles and sinews could be separated and laid bare for others to grope and identify. And for a moment they were us; our bones and our muscles and our skin. We went home from lab and dreamed of cadavers pumping with life, arteries pulsing, muscles twitching, and we awoke to find ourselves on chrome tables, pristinely preserved, awaiting the judgment of our parts. That body has a great lateral rectus, this one has a perfect cystic duct, speaking in these terms that create distance. Although we may seem removed, there is a silent knowledge that is known only to the select few who have eviscerated and torn, sliced and shredded another’s flesh…that when we are alone, in moments of reflection, we know.
We know that as far as we may remove ourselves, as much as we may joke, and detach, in our personal reflections we are still just as aware of our humanity as anyone else, if not more. We retain our compassion because as a class, we know what lies within, in ways that few have the privilege of knowing. We spoke earlier about thanks and gratitude, and the reason we are so filled with it is precisely because of this knowledge. Dissecting a body doesn’t separate us, it doesn’t make us callous, it doesn’t render us medical robots. Through the process of dissection, we learned to grasp the eternal, we consumed their flesh, and we became as one, united in our common humanity.
And so as we move forward to working with patients and advancing in our profession, we will always remember this course as a defining moment. We will remember our cadavers as our first and most understanding patients, but most of all we will remember them as our reflections. And we will know our compassion.
Ragini Bhadula is a third year medical student at Rush Medical College.