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highly recommended |
memories 
Just finished this book. Had to stop several times because of memories of my medical school and residency years. Cried some, laughed some and nodded my head often. What I liked was that this was not simply a memoir , but an intriguing look at medical history and practices in other countries. I am a child psychiatrist and part time poet, so I identified on many levels. I was the reader at our table-2 prospective surgeons took over the dissection. The emotions of becoming a doctor are wonderfully described and I will recommend it to fellow physicians and prospective ones alike. Beautifully done.
Jim Wicoff m.d.
A thoughtful semester with a cadaver named Eve
First year med students learn anatomy by spending a semester, 14 hours a week, dissecting a cadaver. Issues of cultural taboo, squeamishness and professionalism necessarily arise. Montross, who, at 28, had already been a poet and a teacher, chooses this profound experience as the backbone of her memoir on becoming a doctor.
Older than most of her classmates, she has a stable, happy relationship and a wider, more mature perspective than, say, gung-ho Raj, fresh from college, who can't wait to start cutting. Montross herself is much more ambivalent and approaches her team's corpse with curiosity about its life.
With their first view of her, their cadaver furnishes her own name - Eve. The old woman has no belly button! Montross takes us through her team of four's first cuts - the trepidation, ambivalence, feelings of inadequacy and amazement. She also tells us how it feels to put scalpel to embalmed flesh, to saw through bones and softer tissue.
"The muscle and cartilage are much easier to saw, but, as a result, doing so lacks the distraction that effort affords. The tissue spins off the blade in small bits, which look like tiny roots or fingernail clippings."
Graphic descriptions of the layers of flesh and muscle, the intricate and ingenious, but messy and confusing circulation system, the distinct and functional organs, fascinate and repel. Montross describes the process of normal decay after death - but the medical cadavers could remain at room temperature for 20 years without further decay.
Taking periodic breaks, she explores the history of medical cadavers: body snatchers and religious taboos, the early scientists who donated their own bodies, and the condemned prisoners donated by the state.
She visits the historic dissecting theater at Padua, which probably had a table that flipped, so if officials approached the forbidden corpse could be hidden below, while an animal appeared in its place. Montross reflects on the dedication of those early doctors and students who risked disgrace, prison and even death for the acquisition of knowledge.
Another visit takes her to Rome, to the crypt of the Capuchin monks, maintained and added to from 1631 to 1870. The bones of 4,000 friars have been meticulously preserved in a series of chapels. But far stranger than the skeletons still standing in their habits are the chandeliers of arm bones and clavicles hanging from the ceilings, the filigree of ribs decorating the doorways, the wreaths of pelvises and backbones displayed on the walls.
Clinical detachment has always struggled with cultural or emotional taboos and Montross returns again and again to her own efforts to balance feeling and professionalism throughout her med school experience. "My ability to manage my own discomfort in the face of their bodies and their illnesses would be one of the most critical lessons of my medical training."
She tells of treating a non-responsive patient day after day, going through the motions, her thoughts elsewhere, until one day she comes in to find his walls festooned with a child's drawings and family pictures and the man is transformed from chore to human being, though nothing about him has changed.
At the other end of the spectrum, having followed a patient for some time, she approaches the family to discuss end-of-life issues and bursts into tears.
The author's grandparents were also declining during her first year. "I was aware that my own personal grappling with the body's ability to heal and fail colored the ways in which I approached my medical studies."
Her studies seemed removed from real life; her knowledge inadequate, yet she knows there is no cure for aging. She could trace the path disease and injury had taken: "But in what locatable space was the reason the tissue did not heal?"
Ever thoughtful in her feeling, ever feeling in her thinking, Montross communicates the hopes and the limits of medicine, the strivings and pitfalls of doctoring. Honest and informative, Montross' first book ranks among the best of medical memoirs.
Body of Work a must read for anyone in the healing arts
Poet MD Christine Montross has used her literary talents to share some of the most profound moments of her experiences of cadavar labs as a medical student. She makes the apt observation that students' sensitive/or indifferent reactions to dissection somehow predict their future sensitive/indifferent reactions to patients. That many students experience PTSD after dissections will startle a lot of readers - especially those of us who treat PTSD in other very different contexts.
Medical Humanity Even At The Dissection Table 
A first-year medical student remembers with clarity and thoughtfulness one of the great emotional traumas of medical school, the semester-long process of dissecting a cadaver. This could read like a recital of atrocity, or worse. Instead, without muting the emotional trauma that comes with disassembling every square inch of a human body, Dr. Montross focuses on her growing emotional bond with 'Eve.' The result is a remarkable symbiosis between the living student and her deceased 'instructor.' The author's style is direct, even confrontational at times; this isn't for the squeamish or faint of heart. But Montross never fails to treat her subject with respect and dignity, even honor. It is a devastatingly dense relationship within the stifling confines of the gross anatomy lab. But as the author makes clear, it is absolutely necessary for a young doctor's training. Here, the medical student/author emotionally dissects herself while reducing 'her' cadaver to, well, nothing. The process, however gory it might sound, is beautiful, revealing - literally and figuratively - and results is great empathy between 'physician' and 'patient.' As one destroys the other in her search for knowledge, they bond in a way that can only be described as beautiful and tender. This book gives the reader who is open to it an altogether different understanding of doctors and the medical profession. The profession is the better for Dr. Montross's explanation of the process by which she became a doctor.
Slow start but solid finish
I found this book to be wonderfully insightful. It gave me a a different perspective on the actual physical body while tying it all together in emotionally relevant bow.
reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5
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based on 22 reviews
