And, as I found today, the body can invoke complex emotions. Today was my second anatomy lab, and surprisingly it went much less smoothly than the first. I suppose I was feeling especially human, or maybe my cadaver was, because today we were connected. This connection forced my mind to scream with every contact of the scalpel and each hammering of the chisel.
I have no doubt that in future labs I will be able to disconnect myself and keep my emotional response at bay, but I hope that I will never completely lose this sensitivity that comes with the naivety of being a beginner medical student. Remembering that “our cadavers” belonged to individuals brave enough and selfless enough to concretely teach us about the human body should teach us a lesson about respect not only for the dead, but also for the living.
If we can connect with a nonliving human, making a connection to a living patient should be easy. I think this human connection with our patients will make us more compassionate, caring, sensitive, thorough doctors who can keep from viewing common ailments as monotonous and who remember that each patient is a whole human being more than merely a disease.
In the words of Dr. Francis W. Peabody in his lecture, The Care of the Patient, “The secret of the care of the patient is caring for the patient.” Let’s practice on our cadavers.