Book review
For me, this book was perfect and hit a perfect time. Much longer review later., but the writing was fluid and lovely. The themes and musings on our relationships to death hit on the same line as thoughts I have been having lately. I love medical history and medical nonfiction and memoirs, and this was one of the best I have read.
Ok, longer review. This book both cemented my fascination with wanting to go to medical school or some further medical training, and also cemented the fact that I could never handle medical school. Not necessarily because of the gross anatomy cadaver dissection lab, but despite my love of medicine, anatomy, science, and knowledge, I think it’s just too grueling. However, it also drove home a point that I wish I had known a few years ago. I did half of a two year surgical tech program(operating room assistant) before dropping out for v various reasons. One of the reasons I chose that program was that I knew it was hard. One of the biggest reasons I had for leaving the program was the feeling that I had no idea what I was doing, and wasn’t really getting taught that. Apparently, all medical students feel the same way, only some are made aware of these feelings through their instructors and peers and can talk about it, and others are just made to feel that it’s all you and in your head. This knowledge or having had more open discussion about it might have changed my mind. She discusses a paper she read about detached concern and death anxiety among first year medical students in relation to their experiences in the cadaver lab, and how that course helps create the insider/outsider mentality and emotional strength needed to practice medicine.
Later in the book, she talks about this further, about how a failure or weakness on the part of someone working in the medical field can cost someone their life, or cause great harm, but how no one wants to talk about these feelings:
‘It is unacceptable to fail; it is unacceptable to be weak. Admission of either makes one seem unfit for the lofty charge…And thus in 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. ‘
I really related to the author’s experiences with her surgical rotations and early patient care situations. I had what I feel are some really interesting experiences and saw things that a lot of people don’t get to see or are even aware of. At one point the author talks about returning home after a day in the operating room and shares this thought with her partner:
‘The second thing I tell her is that I am stunned by how roughly the body is treated during surgery, how the intestines were pulled out of the body and shoved back in, then mashed on one side, literally tucked tightly into the body beneath a towel and held back by huge metal clamps. I tell her that it is not at all the way one would intuitively treat a living body.’
This is something I felt and witnessed during my time in the OR. The taught us about how to depersonalize, and yet at the same time how much care needs to be take to not have someone’s arm turned the wrong way for a few hours to prevent a pinched nerve. Medicine is full of large contradictions.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about people’s relationships to and feelings surrounding death, and this book had a lot of musings on that as well. One of the things I was most dreading and looking forward to was near the end of the book/course when the author and lab partners would have to finally reveal the cadavers face and finish their dissection. As much as you want to compartmentalize, seeing a face of someone that could be your grandmother and brings life into this thing you have densensized yourself to for months is challenging and through provoking. I found it fascinating when she talked about how many medical students have nightmares throughout their semester in the cadaver lab.
The final takeaway I got from this book was that I almost definitely want to donate my body to science when I die. I even read about the requirements of some of the local medical schools. There are many ways your donation can be used, and I would be happy to do something for science and academia.
- Goodreads rating – 3.96
- REVIEW – Jen