Body of Work (Christine Montross)
This book was a morbid fascination. “Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab” was written by Christine Montross, a poet and teacher who became a psychiatrist. The book follows Montross through her first-year medical anatomy lab. Her writing is so rich and technical I feel as if I’m there, dissecting the heart, removing the brain, exploring the abdomen, hands, and pelvis.
Interwoven with descriptions of the dissection are memories from Montross’s childhood and ultimately how her anatomy lab experiences would go on to influence her interactions with patients. “Body of Work” also includes an entertaining history of anatomy – body snatchers, religious superstitions, and the deep public mistrust of early anatomists. But my favourite parts were Montross’s reflections on all the philosophical and moral preoccupations uniquely suited to an anatomy lab – the paradoxes, contradictions, and absurdity; how cadavers are both alien and familiar, reflections on the medical boundaries between life and death, and how dissection occupies that preternatural interspace.
I had never thought of donating my body to a medical school before, and of course now that I know what happens to a cadaver there’s an additional tension to that idea. But at the same time, there’s something beautiful and intangibly delightful in one’s physical corpse being taken apart and converted into something more abstract, like knowledge. That’s a type of secular incorporeality I could really get behind. How interesting to reflect on the power of a corpse, and the ways it retains its humanity, or the ways it transforms the humanity of strangers.