Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab

The midpoint in medicine between excessive emotional involvement with patients and a complete lack of empathy is not a simple one to locate.

Even the most comic moment contains an element of melancholy; even the deepest tragedy harbors a trace of the ironic.

As her body empties, I feel more and more hollow. I think I must offer her some explanation, but when I look to her face, there is clear and perfect water swirling from her open mouth, a question in a language I cannot comprehend.

But the problem arises when instead of setting aside our natural reactions, they are denied altogether. Then the culture simply becomes superhuman. And thus is the realm of the superhuman there is no room for human frailty, and admission of it by one risks revealing the illusion of the many. So no one speaks up, and as a result each person believes that she is alone in her experience. To that end, we are left in a profession of untouchable greatness and infallibility, but one whose members kill themselves more than others.

And so, just as the humanity of our cadavers asserts itself in nail polish and tattoos, the inverse of humanity emerges in the body's utter lack of response to profound wounds.

I feel your body, your sick and scared body. And I feel how it must be different from how it was, and how it is different from mine.

The most alarming moments of anatomy are not the bizarre, the unknown. They are the familiar.