Travels Read Free

indescribable; the unwillingness to wipe the sweat away because you’d only coat your face with phenol; the sudden horrified discovery that a bit of flesh has been flicked away and landed, sticking, to your face; the ghastly drabness of the room itself, bare, hot, institutional gray. It was a cheerless, exhausting experience.
    Just the names we had to learn were difficult enough: superficial epigastric artery, superficial external pudendal artery, pectineal fascia, anterior superior iliac spine, ligamentum patellae. All in all, forty different structures that had to be memorized for the first day alone.
    We worked until five, and then sutured the incision, squirted liquid over it to keep it moist, and left. We hadn’t managed to finish the dissection, as outlined in the lab manual.
    At the end of the first day, we were already behind.
    Nobody could eat much at dinner. The second-year students regardedus with amusement, but we weren’t making many jokes in the early days. We were all struggling too hard to handle the feelings, to do it at all.
    The autumn heat wave continued, and the dissection room became extremely hot. The fat deposits melted; smells were strong; everything was greasy to the touch. Sometimes the doorknob was so greasy that we had trouble turning it when we departed at the end of the day. Even when maggots got into one cadaver, causing the instructors to run around the room with flyswatters, nobody made jokes.
    It was hard work. We were just trying to do it.
    The weeks passed. The heat wave continued. We were under terrific pressure to keep pace with the dissection, not to fall behind. The first anatomy exams were getting closer. Two afternoons a week, we worked in the dissection rooms. And again on weekends, if we had to catch up. We began to make sour, grim jokes.
    One joke made the rounds:
    A professor of anatomy addresses a woman in the class: “Miss Jones, will you name the organ of the body that increases four times in diameter under stimulation?”
    The woman becomes embarrassed, hems and haws.
    “There’s no need to be embarrassed, Miss Jones. The organ is the pupil of the eye—and you, my dear, are an optimist.”
    After the first anatomy exam, I got a letter in the mail:
    Dear Mr. Crichton:
    Although your performance on the recent Gross Anatomy exam was satisfactory, you were sufficiently close to the borderline that it will be to your advantage to talk to me sometime in the near future, at your convenience.
    Yours sincerely,
George Erikson,
Professor of Anatomy
    Panic. A cold sweat. I was shaken. Then at lunch I discovered that lots of other people had received letters, too. In fact, almost half the class. Iwent to see Dr. Erikson that afternoon. He didn’t say much; just some encouragement, some hints on memorization. Talk to yourself, he said. Say things out loud. Pair up and quiz each other.
    Pretty soon everyone in the anatomy lab was talking out loud, repeating mnemonics to help them remember.
    “S 2, 3, 4, keeps your rectum off the floor.” That told you where the nerves to the levator-ani muscle originate, in the second, third, and fourth sacral segments.
    “Saint George Street.” For the order of muscles inserting around the knee.
    “The Zebra Bit My Cock.” For the branches of the facial nerve: temporal, zygomatic, buccal, mandibular, cervical.
    My lab partner developed a new one: “TE, TE, ON, OM.” Two eyes, two ears, one nose, one mouth.
    They quizzed us constantly, calling us “Doctor” even though we were first-year students. One instructor came in and threw up an X-ray of a skull. I’d never seen one before. A skull X-ray is incredibly complex.
    “All right, Dr. Crichton, what would you say this is?”
    He pointed to a whitish area on the film. It was near the face, and horizontal.
    “The hard palate?”
    “No, that’s down here.” He pointed to another horizontal line, a little below.
    I tried again, and suddenly it came to me: “The inferior border of the