“Young woman, is that a human bone?” a voice called to me severely from the other end of the long hall.
“Yes, would you like to see it?” I answered—how innocently, I cannot say. I am under the impression that even at the start I recognized her horror, and did it mischievously, but with an air of innocence as I held it toward her.
“You horrid thing!” she gasped and disappeared in her room. This disconcerted me: She was the head-laundress of the institution, and she and the Superintendent were great friends. I well knew she was angry, but I was a bit angry, too. I didn’t like being called names, and had high ideas of the respectability of my pursuit; I knew it was neither horrid nor disgraceful to study anatomy, whatever she in her prim, prudish way might think. Getting more and more angry, I could study no longer.
That night, dear, sensitive Miss Wilkins came to me in perturbation: I had offended Miss Tyler; she might complain of me to the Superintendent. I got on my highest heels of dignity: Miss Tyler had offended me; I was sitting in my end of the hall attending to my own affairs when she accosted me; and when I politely answered her, even offering to show her what I was interested in, and about which she seemed so curious, she had insulted me, rudely called me names, and slammed her door, and the episode had spoiled my afternoon’s study; and did not Miss Wilkins herself think that the cause for complaint was on my side?
Then it was that Miss Wilkins laboured with me. At first I was obdurate, and even in the end did not quite agree with her; but so persuasive was she, that I promised not to study my bones in the hall again, and not to offend Miss Tyler, or any one else, by what was to them unquestionably an offensive sight. She reminded me that we must not expect everyone to look upon these things from the scientific standpoint; that we must respect the prejudices of others; that we surely did not want to make ourselves conspicuous or obnoxious, and bring reproach upon women medical students. She struck the right note there, knowing how I recoiled from Dr. Matson’s mannish ways, and that I had said I would rather not be a doctor at all, if I had to get coarse and masculine. As she showed how timid and conservative Miss Tyler was, she made me feel it my duty to refrain from further wounding her sensibilities.
How we observed, and insensibly estimated, our various instructors! Our professor in physiology was a diffident, scholarly man, stiff as a poker; dry and ponderous as a lecturer. We liked the chemistry professor, and liked the laboratory work, yet chemistry was for me the hardest first-year study. Nowadays when I see certain chemicals that we used in experiments, I get a sudden vision of my desk in the laboratory, with the test-tubes, the gas-burners, the retorts, the filter-papers, and all; and can even see the faces of the various students as they stand at their desks heating solutions; holding others up to the light—now one bends to record something on a chart, now there’s a crash of broken glass, a rustle and a stir, perhaps a giggle, as some unlucky student blunders in an experiment. How it all comes back at the sight of a bottle marked Cupric Sulphate, or H2 SO4! What a witty lecturer we had in the History and Methodology of Medicine—a short, fidgety man with big blue eyes and benevolent face. He had a funny way of pulling at his collars and cuffs while lecturing, as if they choked him and he wished he could take them off.
When early in the first year our courses in dissections began, I was all eagerness—the untried always having its charm for me. My name being at the beginning of the alphabet, it fell to me to be one of the first six students to work on the first subject. I had bought my dissecting-case from one of the “middlers”; my long-sleeved apron was ready; and I awaited impatiently the day, little dreaming what I was so eager about.
Assembled in the dissecting room that first day to see us begin were many middlers and seniors, as well as the sixty or more in our own class. Each “subject,” as the cadavers are called, is apportioned in six “parts,” lots being cast for the “parts,” six students working simultaneously on a body. Half the abdomen and the right lower extremity fell to me. My partner on the other side was a young woman, older than I, but very shy and reserved. Other students drew the head and neck, the chest and upper extremities.
That first day as we entered the dissecting room there lay the body, a man’s body, stiff and stark, on the slanting zinc-covered table. The arteries had been injected with red wax, and much of this loose wax and other extraneous matter was clinging to the skin of our subject. It was horrible to see the naked body. I had not thought of that. I don’t know what I had thought of, surely not that—and this room full of onlooking students!