And that was about all of the nightlife I could handle. The fiancee and I, along with the future in-laws, needed to kick back and spend a relaxing day visiting the Bodies exhibit at the South Street Seaport. Much less lame than cracking that physiology text, right? Right.
Before we saw the exhibit, the father-in-law-to-be voiced some ethical concerns about the show. Some folks claim the bodies on display were those of Chinese prisoners who were executed in order to feed a booming black market organ industry. One might guess that these people never gave explicit permission to have their bodies dissected and put on display for gawking foreigners. At the very least, the origin of these bodies is uncertain. The folks who run the exhibit maintain that "the bodies belonged to people from China who died unidentified or unclaimed by family members." You can read more about the controversy here and here, but believe me when I say that nothing takes the fun out of flayed corpses like nagging ethical concerns.
Undeterred, we marched on down to the South Street Seaport to get us a look-see. And we weren't the only ones with the idea. The place was mobbed with all sorts of people. The crowd comprised folks of all colors, ages, backgrounds, and views on personal hygeine. The young and the old walked hand-in-hand past men cut in half to expose their viscera ("Grandma, why doesn't the man have any skin?" "That's what happens when you write an inflammatory letter to the editor in the Shanghai Gazette, Timmy."). There were people who had obviously studied human physiology for much of their lives, and others who evidently had only a cursory understanding of the typical number of human limbs or the placement of skin relative to the rest of the body. But everyone appeared equally fascinated.
Grown men and women would walk up to a display of the preserved vasculature of the kidneys, they'd grab the little box with both hands, bring their noses right up to the glass, and squawk excitedly about how little the blood vessels are and how amazing it was that, without any of the surrounding flesh, those vessels still make two distinct little kidney shapes. You'd see a dozen people standing around a body that's posed holding a football, and every one of them would be reading the display while mimicking the motions needed to hold and throw the football. They'd be feeling for tendons in their hands and reaching around themselves to feel the movement of various muscle groups. Surrounding the display of a smoker's lungs, I could see high schoolers glancing anxiously at their friends, their hands migrating unconsciously to cover the box-shaped bulges in their pockets.
I no longer meet new people who aren't in my class, but I used to meet new people on occasion before I started school. Invariably, when those folks found out I was going to be a medical student, the first thing they mentioned was gross anatomy. "Oooh, are you going to have to cut open a dead person? I couldn't handle that," and less frequently, "awesome, I've always wanted to cut a guy." Either way, this seems to be the aspect of medicine that most universally intrigues people. Nobody's ever said to me, "Oooh, do you have to spend hours hunched over textbooks highlighting? That sounds gross," or "awesome, I've always wanted to slowly turn every page of a book flourescent yellow."
Of course, gross anatomy is one of the things that really excites me about this upcoming semester. I fully expect to be one of any number of students grabbing those kidneys with two hands, pressing my nose up against the retroperitoneum, and exclaiming, "look how kidney-shaped these little guys are!" Logistically, it only makes sense that this experience is usually reserved for medical students and communist prison wardens. However, it's apparent through the wild success of the Bodies exhibit, that there are lots of folks out there, folks of all ages, colors, and creeds, who've always wanted to cut a guy.
So, you know, heads up.
No comments:
Post a Comment