The Demonstrator in anatomy gave us a serious talk, inciting us to earnestness, cautioning us against carelessness, levity, or other unseemly behaviour, after which he told us to set to work. The first thing, he said, was to sponge the part assigned to us, then make our incisions, as we had been previously instructed, and proceed with the dissections.
I shall never forget the repugnance as well as the embarrassment I felt at beginning our task. The young men in our class, as new as were we to it all, were awed as well as we, but those horrid middlers and seniors looking on with amusement! I felt my face getting redder and redder, and Miss Bigelow’s cheeks looked as though they would burst; but with downcast eyes we kept at work, probably taking far more pains than we needed to. I can see just how gingerly we held the sponges; the wax stuck; we thought we had to get off every speck. Then Miss Bigelow, without looking up, whispered, “What shall we do with the pail?”
“Empty it, I suppose,” I snapped out; and getting up courage enough to glance round the room, spied a sink. Stooping, I picked up the loathsome pail and, with blazing cheeks, started across the room, feeling that a great indignity was being undergone—to have to do this at all was bad enough (I still think it was janitor’s work), but it was intolerable to do it before those idle middlers.
Before I had taken many steps a young man in our class came up, took the pail from me, and in a soothing tone said, “Please let me—now the worst is over, Miss Arnold.” The tears started at his kindness. The other young men must have felt ashamed, for they soon rallied round the table, showing us how to make the first incisions, how to hold our scalpels and tissue forceps, in fact, giving us many useful hints. We had had the theory, but to make the actual incisions, to lift the skin and deftly dissect it from the tissues beneath—was different from what we had imagined.
Going from student to student, the Demonstrator instructed and encouraged each in turn. Soon the room, thinned of its spectators, took on a different aspect: the novices bent over their work with interest and absorption. The painful emotion I had felt at seeing those bodies, stripped and at the mercy of our little knives and forceps, soon gave place to genuine enthusiasm. I dreaded the feel of the cold skin, but once that was removed, I was all interest; one then lost sight of the human side, and saw only the beautiful mechanism. How wonderful it seemed when I had the external abdominal muscle laid bare, and its structure disclosed, and this and the other muscles and their adaptations seen! Some days later when one of the girls, working on an arm, had the deltoid exposed, I was surprised to hear one of the assistant demonstrators (a woman) say to her, “It is a pretty muscle, isn’t it?” “Pretty” seemed such an incongruous word to use, but I soon learned to admire the well-dissected muscles, though rather than “pretty” I should have called them “beautiful.”
The instructors demonstrated the viscera, which, with the muscles and other “soft parts” were removed piecemeal, and disposed of daily. Whitman’s tremendously realistic line, “What is removed drops horribly into the pail,” always takes me back to the dissecting room with its repulsive odours and its sorry sights. But our growing interest did much to mitigate the repellent features.
The actual dissection was interesting and easy for me, but it was not easy to demonstrate the muscles and groups of muscles, for it was always difficult to comprehend their action. Never having been able to understand levers and pulleys and mechanical things, I could not reason out things which were so obvious to others. It was absurd, after getting the muscles nicely dissected, with their points of origin and insertion before my very eyes, to be unable to deduce what their actions were. I had no “gumption.” This inability on my part puzzled the Demonstrator and his assistants—the senior students, who moved about from table to table, listening to our recitations whenever we would get a group of muscles exposed for demonstration. One dignified senior who was usually on hand to hear me recite, was painstaking in trying to make me understand their action: “Why, can’t you see?” he would ask; then, convinced that I could not, would try to drill it into my head. His dignified air awed me considerably, and I was demure and respectful to him, always calling him “Doctor” as, in the freshness of our first-year’s awe of them, we supposed we had to call the seniors. But one day, when in the reading room, I saw him try to kiss one of the senior girls, my awe vanished; after that I was a trifle pert and independent. It was funny how my whole attitude then changed toward him. I suddenly saw through the mock dignity he carried while in the dissecting room. In vain he tried to impress me with his gravity, I only laughed in his face. So we soon got on fairly friendly terms, as much as a humble junior and a “grave and reverend senior” could be. Sometimes I surprised him looking at me with a quizzical, half-amused look that changed to a frown and an attempt at dignity, when he saw I was observing him. I imagine he quite enjoyed the deference of my earlier manner, and was not a little annoyed at the discovery which had disillusioned me.
Some weeks after I had seen him trying to steal that kiss, when I was one day working on the head and face, he came up to hear me demonstrate the facial muscles. The action of the muscles had got to be a kind of joke between us, still he always laid particular stress on that, persisting until I understood, and when practicable usually requiring me to illustrate the action. That day I had been dissecting out the Orbicularis Oris—the round muscle of the mouth. After I had described it and its relations, he asked smilingly, “And the action?” I replied that it was used to pucker the mouth, as in whistling, and—and (mischievously) in kissing—if you can. He blushed furiously, knowing then, positively, that I had, on that occasion, seen the girl slip out of his grasp. Assuming a mock dignity he said, “I have a mind to require you to illustrate the action—it is within my province, you know.” Then I felt cheap, and blushed furiously, too. Later in the afternoon the Demonstrator himself came round and slyly asked if I was ready to demonstrate the action of the Orbicularis Oris yet, so I knew the senior assistant had told him about it.
We had been told that no parts of our subjects might be taken from the dissecting room—a necessary prohibition, as the College pledged itself to bury the skeletons intact. (The boys used to say it was so there would not be so much confusion on Resurrection Morn.) But each year students were intent on purloining a hand or a foot, or some part, as a souvenir. Because forbidden, of course I had this silly ambition, too. (We were on our honour, else it would have been easy.) I bethought me how I could get around the restriction: Our Anatomy said that sesamoid bones were small unimportant bones sometimes found in the tendons, not properly included as a part of the skeleton. The Demonstrator had urged us all to hunt for sesamoid bones, meaning, of course, the small adventitious ones that were a rarity. Herein I saw my chance: One day while working around the knee, as the Demonstrator stood watching me, I asked:
“Doctor S——, have any sesamoid bones been found this year?”