lickin’ yer chops, Berto.
I couldn’t help it; I let out a snorting laugh, which drew a glare from Gravel Gertie.
Later we found out that her hoarse voice was the result of a rare condition affecting her vocal cords. It would ultimately take her life.
“Blunt dissection is always your best bet. You won’t damage structures that way.”
While we looked on, Hedley’s hands reached like ice-cream scoops on either side of Harry’s brain, his gloved fingers gently loosening the tissues from the boney case we call the skull. He motioned for me to cut underneath where the telephone cables of the brain—what ultimately becomes the spinal cord—exit through the base of the skull.
The entire class watched Hedley triumphantly holding that tan-gray object above his head like a proud father.
All that Harry had once been, all that he had once felt and experienced—love, hate, happiness, despair, ecstasy—vibrated as electrical and chemical impulses through that amazingly compact, organic computer.
Where was Harry now?
Ya don’ wanna know, kid.
Days, weeks, months passed. Gradually we got to know Harry more intimately than any partner he had had in life. We spent extra time on weekends and evenings studying him, often bringing snacks and sandwiches to munch on. We’d quiz one another on the various structures such as Harry’s cigarette-smoke-stained lungs, his enlarged heart surrounded by fat, his coronary arteries already almost completely occluded. If the stroke hadn’t killed him Harry would have died almost as quickly from a massive heart attack. And if that hadn’t done him in, the aneurysm in his aorta, a balloon-like weakness in the artery wall, would have sparked a fatal hemorrhage if someone had punched him in the gut—or even if he had sneezed too hard.
Harry’s other internal organs were no better. His liver was also enlarged, and his pancreas was scarred from too much alcohol. His gallbladder was filled with stones; his kidneys shrunken, the effect of the prolonged, high blood pressure.
This man had felt pain and ignored it for most of his adult life.
No doubt about it, Harry had lived hard and died young. The scarring from gonorrhea and syphilis, and the premature enlargement of his prostate, betrayed his penchant for the ladies.
The only organs that seemed intact were his stomach and intestines—until Gable pointed out the ulcers, a result of his alcohol intake.
We examined Harry’s muscles, separating each one out and noting how it created a particular motion. It was a difficult study; the preservative fluids had made the muscle fibers brittle, and the evaporation and drying out made them less comprehensible.
We spent time on another cadaver as well—a necessity for learning the distaff anatomy. During our first trade, we learned that the other group had named her “Shirley.”
Reminds me of the gal that was with me when I got whacked. Remember her, Berto?
The old nursery rhyme is wrong; women aren’t made of sugar and spice, and not everything is nice. They, too, can live hard lives and suffer the consequences, often more severely than their male counterparts.
Sometimes I dream of Harry and Shirley.
Did they ever meet in life?
By early spring our cadaver was now in pieces. We had been tested many times on him and the other bodies in grimoire-march practical exams.
We had suffered routines like this throughout college, moving in single file past various stations of the biologic cross, given twenty seconds to identify ambiguous structures in sea creatures, plants, frogs, cats, and dogs.
Now the human counterpart challenged us: dried-out pieces of humanity with pins stuck through them and a question scribbled alongside that taxed our brains:
One: What the hell was that small dried-out macaroni-like tube that bore no resemblance to its real-life appearance?
Two: What did it do?
Three: What other action did it work against?
And so on.
Our first year was coming to an end. We had studied the normal aspects of the human body: its chemistries, its physiology, and its large, small and microscopic structures. We had attended physical-diagnosis sessions, seeing and talking to live patients. At first clumsy and uncertain, then with more and more self-assurance, we examined them in front of our professors.
Each time we attended, we carried our little black bags like talismans, self-consciously removing the tools of our trade, as we performed for grades.
And Harry? By the end of the term we had reduced him to skeletal bone and dried-out gristle. The lab assistants had removed his dissected body parts, and we were told they would be cremated in a non-denominational, religious ceremony.
We could not participate.
Once more I envy the present generation.
Hedley and Gable were more animated than usual that second-to-last day in the gross-anatomy lab.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a rare treat for you,” Gable trilled.
Uh-oh, she’s getting another…
Shut up, Sal! She’s one of the nicest people you could ever meet.
“Dr. Hedley has been experimenting with new and improved preservative fluids. These allow the body tissues to appear more normal, more … uh … lifelike in their flexibility.”
In a flourish more appropriate to a Cordon Bleu Parisian chef, Hedley pulled the cover off of a small, wheeled table, and we stared at disembodied arms, legs and heads that looked as though they had just fallen off someone walking by. He proudly picked up an arm-forearm-hand combination and pulled on the exposed tendons.
Those of you who are old enough to remember a TV show called “The Addams Family” may understand why some in our class began to laugh and clap, as Hedley the puppeteer manipulated that limb to move across the table. Then each of us experienced the frisson of shaking hands with it.
What about those heads?
If you are squeamish, skip the next paragraph.
Hedley took a flexible tube and inserted it into the stump of the trachea—the windpipe. He held the mouth of the disembodied head open and blew into the plastic pipe. An eerie “ahhhhhhh” resulted, as Hedley’s breath activated the vocal cords of a dead man.
Congrats, kid. You didn’t even flinch.
Thanks, Sal.
Time for me to go, Berto. You’re gonna do just fine now.
Don’t you want to see me make a fool of myself?
Nah, I know you won’t. ’Sides, Corrado and I … we’re gonna have a gab fest with Harry and Shirley.
Good-bye, Sal.
Nope,
