How much would you pay to see a human body taken apart? Earlier
this week, 400 people handed over the equivalent of $19 each to sit
in a converted east London brewery and watch Britain’s first
public
autopsy since 1832.
According to some of his peers, the German doctor who performed
the dissection — and who could end up in prison for doing so
without a license — was merely giving his audience lurid
entertainment. (He’d already made a fortune exhibiting
cross-sectioned cadavers in sports poses.) But another physician,
who performed the color commentary for Wednesday’s post-mortem,
made a claim for the event’s socially redeeming value: it could
help people overcome their fear of organ transplantation.
Pretty flimsy, you must agree. I can’t imagine that the
spectacle of somebody else’s inert insides could change anybody’s
feelings about giving away his kidneys after death. And recipients
are presumably too sick to quibble over transplanted organs’
second-hand status. Watching an autopsy need not change one’s mind
about anything, though in my case it did lead to a surprise.
It happened nine years ago, when I was in graduate school and
still had time for such diversions. A medical student friend told
me that his anatomy professor sometimes let the class bring in
guests, so naturally I begged for an invitation. Convinced that my
interest wasn’t simply ghoulish, or else not caring if it was, my
friend agreed.
We met at a Dunkin Donuts next door to the hospital. I toyed
with not eating breakfast, then decided I was likelier to feel
queasy on an empty stomach. My friend told me gently that if I felt
uncomfortable I shouldn’t hesitate to leave. I wondered if I was
more apt to vomit or faint.
On our way in, my friend and his classmates in surgical scrubs
greeted each other like any group of students straggling into
class. It was a mild fall day and many surely wanted to be
outdoors, but I sensed no dread of what awaited them inside. After
all, they’d been at it for weeks.
I saw the first one before I was ready. Walking down a hallway,
I let my gaze wander slightly, and there it was through an open
doorway: the first dead human body I had ever seen. The skin was
sallow, and the head was wrapped in cheesecloth. All the heads, I
discovered a moment later when I walked in and found myself amid a
dozen corpses, were mercifully covered this way.
The first cadaver I’d spotted turned out to be mine, or rather,
the one to which my friend and the five others in his study group
were assigned. (I wouldn’t be taking part, of course, but standing
off to the side and discreetly observing.) Before the actual work
started, we watched a video preview of what everyone was supposed
to be looking for that day — all of it somewhere around the
abdomen, as I recall.
I was grateful for a reason to look away from the flesh on the
tables, if only for two or three minutes, while I steeled myself
for a long and close inspection. I didn’t try to reason with myself
that this was “only tissue,” and that it couldn’t bite. I resorted
not to reason but to will: I simply insisted that these
dead bodies would not scare me.
And it worked. When I looked down from the video monitor, the
object on the table was no longer remotely horrifying; and as the
young doctors-to-be made their incisions, it grew fascinating. The
students’ attitude helped me stay calm. They chatted and joked
without losing focus. One woman spoke admiringly of the corpse’s
condition. Most of the bodies, my friend explained, were those of
old people who had wanted their remains to serve the cause of
science. Such people apparently tended to exercise.
When I went back to my room later that morning, I suppose I did
feel a bit more alive, as I had hoped I would. But the feeling
quickly wore off, along with my heightened awareness of death. What
lasted much longer was the faint reek of formaldehyde on my
clothes. After a dozen washings, I was still sure I could pick up
the odor.
I spent an hour and a half watching people dismantle a human
body in the hope that this would aid my understanding of life and
death. The main thing I learned was that it changed nothing. I
still didn’t really believe that the object on the table
would one day be me. Otherwise I might not have been able to look
at it.
