Section 1 > Exercise 1 > Personalizing the body
With the previous materials, you have reflected on the aesthetic and intellectual pleasure of observing the body. Now recall Gewanter's counterargument: this pleasure is a pleasure for inert objects, at the expense of the living.
Read the following reflection by a medical students participating in Meryl Levin's photographic anatomy project.
We dissected the heart this week, and some people spoke about feeling a more personal side of their cadavers. I held the heart in my hand. In fact, I held two hearts in my hands, and even posed for the camera with them. But I didn't feel a "pang" of anything. No chills up my spine, no nauseous pit in my stomach. Just intellectual curiosity more than anything else. Carrie. From: Levin, Anatomy of Anatomy, p. 58.
Discuss the way the students process the emotional and objective aspects of their experience in the anatomy lab. If you have been in anatomy lab, were you excited at the opportunity to dissect a body? Did this excitement conflict with the knowledge that the body you were dissecting was once alive? How did you reconcile the material body with the imagined person once alive? Are you more like the son or the father in David Gewanter's poem, "My father's autopsy?" If you have been in a clinic or hospital, did you have any
experiences which showed a disconnect between intellectual purpose (medical diagnosis, treatment strategies, teaching agendas) and personal suffering? For ideas, return to the vignette at the start of this exercise. Or you can draw on your reading, personal experience, or stories you've heard instead. |
