Christine Montross

As a longtime poet with a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, I have always attempted to find a language for the human body. The body acts and is acted upon; it is engaged in violence and love; it is adored and shamed. It is our interpreter of the world and it delineates our limitations. It is responsible for the persistence of our being, and its inevitable failings about out mortality and close our lives.

When I chose to begin a medical career, I knew that my education would come in the formal doses administered by the tried and true methods of medical pedagogy. I also knew that the tools which serve me well as a poet would serve me well as a medical student: the ability to look closely at small things; the ability to draw connections from disparate objects or events; the ability to create a larger meaning from a series of seemingly unrelated facts. I also knew that my decision to shift my career towards medicine was contingent upon the continuation of my writing. I hoped that the troves of knowledge which I would probe in the histology lab and the neuroanatomy textbook would yield material for writing projects. I didn’t know enough about medicine to know what topic would strike me, but I knew enough about writing to know that something would.

Immediately after I began the process of dissecting a human body in anatomy lab, I knew that the experience was one which would be rich to explore in written form. My fascination with the body reemerged, and it was accompanied by the manifold emotions and discoveries of a process which was simultaneously difficult, intimate, destructive, instructive, revelatory and wild. My own feelings about the process were various and sometimes conflicting. My peers and I experienced a wide range of reactions to our interactions with cadavers from quiet reverence to nausea, from laughter to intense concentration. We became supremely aware of the nature of mortality, and yet it was never more clear to any of us that there is something within each of us which is who we are, and that something is no longer in our dead bodies when they like on metal tables zippered into white plastic bags.

Following lab each day, I would return home and type quickly, journal-style, an account of the day’s events. Some days would focus on the body, and how each uncovered structure looked when revealed; some would address the ways in which each member of my group reacted to an emotionally grueling task – pelvic hemisection, or peeling the scalp away from the skull. As I recorded this process at home, I found myself asked the same questions over and over by non-medical friends and family members. “What is it like?” What does it look like? What does it smell like? Did you name your cadaver? Is it true that…on and on. I was struck by the fact that each of us, walking around in our own bodies, has an innate lack of knowledge about how we are on the inside, and more elusively, how we are after we have died.

My project, therefore, is to write a creative nonfiction piece about the experience of dissecting a human cadaver. I intend to recount the process and answer that “What is it like?” questions, but I also intend to explore how we as medical students are transformed from people with experiences not so different from our roommates and neighbors to people who know the heft of the liver, or the odd consistency of the spleen. I want to look at what happens to us as we transgress our cultural boundaries and cut apart the bodies of people’s loved ones. I want to think through how we are forced to think and rethink our own mortalities and the mortalities of those most precious to us, how we must redefine what we are capable of and comfortable doing, without losing sight of the delicacy and gravity of the task before us. The project will begin as an article, which centers around my own experience and that of my classmates. By the end of the summer, I hope to have the article in such a form that I will be able to market it to a range of publications, from literary journals to Rolling Stone.

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