A few years ago, I had the privilege of participating in anatomical dissections alongside medical students, and let me tell you: Open up a human body, and you will be very surprised by what you see. Nothing is as perfectly clean and clear as anatomical illustrations suggest. The body is murky. Muscles don’t neatly separate for you in order to display their various parts. What lies beneath the chiseled beauty that is a six-pack, to cite one example, is wet and messy. The precise point where a tendon turns to muscle, and ligament attaches to bone, isn’t always obvious. Parts are closely bound together in a body (indeed, “ligament” comes from the Latin for “to bind”), packed in tight and padded within clumps of protective fat, or bunched together with fascia, the corporeal equivalent of cellophane. You have to dig around to find what you’re looking for, and know what it is you are looking for. We were encouraged not only to study our “own” cadaver, but to go from one to another, to another, to compare. “You’re always going to find variation,” I remember one of my anatomy professors telling me. “Everyone’s got the same parts, essentially, but they’re put together in different ways.”
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 11:55:03 +0000
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