Deep in the bowels of the Sidney E. Frank Hall for Life Sciences, surrounded by smaller primate skeletons and crude graffiti, are 25 dead human bodies. They are organized in neat rows, each on its own stainless steel gurney with plastic bags full of removed organs on the bottom shelf, eerily greeting everyone who enters the anatomy lab. These cadavers have been dissected, disemboweled, poked and prodded by students at Alpert Medical School all semester as part of their first year of study.
The bodies are also the subjects of a new book by Christine Montross MD'06, a poet and house staff officer in psychiatry at Brown.
Montross said her book, "Body of Work: Meditations on Morality from the Human Anatomy Lab," seeks to "share with people and also to deal with the emotional intensity of the task of dissection" and to explore "the transition students undergo from non-doctor to doctor."
When she started medical school, "the first question that all my friends and family had for me was, 'What is anatomy like? What do bodies look like, what do they feel like?'" she said. She wrote her book in part as an attempt to answer those questions and also to communicate the profundity of cutting, touching and learning from actual human bodies, who had once been alive and loved.
"It's initially overwhelming to be in a room with these cadavers and also to realize that you're going to be asked to touch and cut them," she said.
"Body of Work" traces Montross' experience from the first day of medical school through her complete dissection of a human cadaver, whom she names Eve. Her descriptions of the human body reflect her background in poetry, as each of the body's internal structures is described in simple and poetic language, lending humanness to what is, in fact, human. Recounting her first assignment - familiarizing herself with the contents of a "bone box" - she describes the scapula as "winglike and twisting," and the hip bone as "elegant and curving and alien."
Just as importantly, Montross documents the effects of dissection on her and her fellow students. Before her first dissection, when she sees "her cadaver" for the first time, she is distracted by the body's arms. "They are covered in age spots and thin and long," she writes. "They are the arms of my grandmother." Montross frankly admits that "I am afraid that I won't be able to do this." But for all the emotional intensity and apparent barbarity of dissecting a human body, the discoveries that Montross makes about anatomy and medicine throughout the book demonstrate the value of this hands-on, real-life, intimate and dramatic form of teaching and learning.
The book reflects the respect that the medical community traditionally shows those who donate their bodies to science. Dale Ritter, director of morphology at the Med School, said that every year, the medical students "hold some sort of memorial service for the donors." After that, the students sign and decorate the walls of the lab, marking the place where they spent so much time, energy and emotion.
Montross took a far less direct path into the lab than most of her peers. She said she "never" planned on going to medical school. "I was not one of these kids who was dressing up as doctors for Halloween and dissecting squirrels in the back yard," she said.
Rather than pursue medicine after studying French literature and environmental science at the University of Michigan, she completed a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing there in 1998 and began teaching high school in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"I was writing a lot of poems about madness, and then when I was teaching high school, I started to see kids with actual mental illness, depression, anxiety," Montross said. "I started to see the more practical and less romantic part of mental illness. I decided I wanted to become a psychiatrist."
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior Audrey Tyrka, whom Montross described in an e-mail as a "professional mentor," said she thought Montross' poetry background helped her as a doctor. As a poet, Montross is "really sensitive to all these different layers of experience" and helps people to come to new understandings about their lives, said Tyrka, who worked with Montross at Butler Hospital. "Her first day on rotation, she was easily functioning on the level of an advanced resident in terms of her ease and comfort and ability to connect with people," which is "unheard of" in a young medical student. "Those qualities are really important in a doctor," especially in a psychiatrist, she added.
"Strangely enough, poetry and medicine have some similarities," Montross said. In writing poetry, "I learned to look very closely at small things, and from those observations make conclusions about the larger world," she said. "I think that medicine asks us to do something very similar."
