of something indescribable—that magical first day of medical school, that first day of the rest of our lives.
Today’s young doctors tell me their initiation as acolytes of the son of Apollo began with a white-coat ceremony: Friends and family watch, while dignitaries bestow the traditional garb on each new student. Each dons it as a vestment of the priesthood he or she is about to enter, while the Oath of Hippocrates is recited by candlelight.
Youngsters! We had no such elegance. Neither did we share in a very wonderful and new tradition of honoring the memory of those who had bequeathed their bodies, so we could learn from the mortality of others.
No, we had the black bag.
We listened with half-baked attention, while the dean and other school officials welcomed us, but our eyes kept darting toward a row of tables at the side of the conference room.
There sat more than a hundred small, black-leather bags—real doctors’ bags—enticing and bewitching us with their silent siren call. Not fancy and not big. Those would come later; these were easily recognizable as student bags.
And yet—and yet—they held the tools of our future trade: a simple stethoscope, a little metal hammer with a triangular rubber head that made us giddy, as we laughed and tapped one another’s knees to watch the involuntary-reflex twitching, and more.
We had to buy the sphygmomanometers—aka blood-pressure cuffs—and the fancy flashlights called oto-ophthalmoscopes. We bruised our arms trying them out. We also nearly blinded ourselves by shining the white-and-green lights in our eyes, and we induced bleeding in our auditory canals, when we jammed the dark-green, plastic speculums into fellow students’ ears.
Do not laugh.
We clutched those bags tightly, as we walked back to our dormitories, ignoring the knowing smiles and outright derision of the upper classmen. We didn’t care.
“Ow! Damn it, Dave, go easy with the cuff!”
Dave assumed that maximum inflation was necessary in his first attempts to take my blood pressure. My arm was frequently numb and swollen.
“You’re burnin’ a hole in my retina, you moron!”
Ah, yes, the moron was me. My initial ineptitude at trying to visualize the back of the eye—the retina and the optic disc—gave him many a migraine.
Dave, whom I called Country Boy, and I served as guinea pigs for one another. We’d hold open our Textbook of Physical Diagnosis and listen and thump and blind each other in desperate attempts to imitate the “correct way” of examining patients. It didn’t matter that we still knew squat about the human body. It also didn’t matter that we were embarrassed to hell and back at the more intimate examinations, which were more painful than a baseball to the groin. We were playing doctor, and this time it was for real.
“Oh, God, today’s gross anatomy lab.”
My classmate Carol’s tiny voice quivered, as we trotted across the campus to that first lab session. Back then the gross anatomy lab was in a different building—a dirty red brick Civil War relic without air conditioning—and we arrived at the door out of breath.
“Hey, City Boy, what the hell are those things on the walls?”
I had to laugh. Dave was a weed-thin Lynchburg farm boy. If he had grown up in my tenement neighborhood back in Newark, and had gone to my ancient elementary school run by nuns, he would easily have recognized gaslight fixtures that predated the electric light.
A bald-headed gnome and a parrot-faced woman waited impatiently, until we settled down.
The gnome harrumphed.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m John Hedley. This is Mrs. Gertrude Gable, my assistant. There are some rules of behavior that we expect—no, demand—of you.”
Gable’s gravelly voice cut in.
“You will be assigned four to a table. You will wear your lab smocks and gloves at all times. I hope you are wearing shoes and clothes that you won’t miss at the end of the year. You won’t want to keep them.”
Dave and I looked quizzically at one another.
“What the hell is she talkin’ about?” he mouthed.
But Gravel Gertie was right; I still have my shoes. Sixty years later I can still smell the formaldehyde. It never did come out. The clothes and green smock are long gone, more the product of diet than a lack of sentimentality. I’m still good looking but not as svelte as I used to be.
“At no time will you be disrespectful of the bodies you will be working on. Treat them as you would want your own body to be treated.”
Hear that, kid? Did those police docs treat mine with respect?
Sal, you’re dead. You don’t belong here!
Can’t think of a better place for a dead guy to be, Berto.
I noticed Hedley staring at my name tag.
“Mr. Galen, did you have something to say?”
“Uh … no, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Hedley cast a baleful glance at me then held up a pudgy hand and pointed at us.
“If I catch any one being an ass, violating these bodies in any way, I will have you expelled right then and there. Do you understand?”
Was he looking right at me?
We nodded. Why would anyone even think of doing something as grotesque as violating a cadaver?
You are one dumb shit, Berto.
Get outta my head, Sal.
Unh- uh, kiddo. Just wait. You’ll be glad I’m here.
I was no stranger to death. My old neighborhood hosted a charter chapter of the unexpected-death club. I met my first member when I was eight years old—my beautiful Marigold Lady of the river, a casualty of a back-alley abortion. Still, I admit, nearly six decades later, I felt a cold chill, as Hedley took a key from his vest pocket and unlocked the lab door.
The odor. That’s what hits you first. The vapors of the preservative liquids assault your nose and forever imprint themselves on your olfactory lobes in that most primitive part of your brain. You never forget it.
So, there we stood, dressed in green lab smocks and staring at row upon row of stainless-steel tables. On each lay a dark-brown, rubber bag, its contents elevating the fabric in the unmistakable shape of a human body. It was a classroom of the dead.
“Pair off in fours.”
Two on each side, we all stared down at those zippered containers then jumped as Gable rasped, “Open your bags!”
The four of us eyed one another, each waiting for someone else to make the first move. We were two guys and two girls: Dave and me, Carol, and Tara. The females glanced at us males with nervous smiles, and we tried to feign nonchalance.
But no one touched that zipper.
“Come
