Before Christine Montross decided to become a psychiatrist, she was a poet, university writing instructor and high school English teacher. So she has a way with words. Now, she has brought that talent to one of the most traumatic parts of medical training – anatomy, the dissection of the human body – in a book entitled “Body of Work.”
In a necessary, but terrifying part of medical school, students must dissect a human body, slowly stripping away the skin, flesh, nerves and muscles that make up that body. As Montross and her classmates remove the layers of a body they dub “Eve,” she turns her thoughts not only to the elements that form a body, but to mortality, humanity and the mystic substance that makes a body human when it animates it.
“The human body harbors mysteries that are not solved by textbooks or studying, and as I have been confronted with them, I have found myself amazed, humbled and unnerved,” Montross writes.
Arriving at medical school, one of the first tasks Montross faces is to “pick up bone boxes.”
The box is her, and our, introduction to the mysteries and beauty of the human body. Inside, she finds a skull “at once eerie and beautiful.” In fact, much of what happens on the table under the powerful lights in the lab where the bodies serve up there mysteries to students, could bear that description.
Despite her initial fear, Montross finds herself drawn to the elderly woman who willingly gave her corpse to the medical school.
She speculates on Eve’s life, ideas fueled by observations of the body she is slowly disassembling: fingernails painted with lavender nail polish; forearms covered with sunspots.
