The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ’s four - part seriesThe course of study of Their Livesis a enchanting and profoundly affecting exploration of the dissection of human cadavers . The articles follow six students at the Medical College of Wisconsin through their gross anatomy course , as well as two multitude who have donate their bodies to science .
Photo byHey Paul Studios .
The act of dissection another person , of learn all that you may from the inside of their body , is an intimate one , and The Course of Their Lives lays stark not just the splanchnic experience of cut off into human anatomy , but also the excited weight of it . There are descriptions of the dissection and the details they learn about their cadaver , even as many of them assay to emotionally outstrip themselves from the job :

On Monday and Wednesday afternoons for two to three hours , they meet , the students at Table 1 and their stiff . A relationship uprise .
They do not know if the honest-to-goodness woman was espouse , had kid , knead . They do n’t know whether she was rich or poor , whether she last on a farm or in an flat in the city .
And yet the students are learning things about this woman that her own house and even the woman herself did not get it on . They know what the fatty tissue paper inside her scummy back looks like . They ’ve peer at the vein that carried line of descent through her trunk , the nerves that ferried impulses and maven to her learning ability .

As McLaren and Zilisch cut away tissue paper , exposing the brachial plexus , a internet of nerves that lead off in the cervix and shoulder , the onetime woman ’s sleeve juts out between them . The arm curves toward McLaren ’s back , the way it might if they were dancing .
Inside that arm lies a chapter of her write up .
As he cuts along the left berm and arm , Zilisch notices that her cephalic vein seems unusually thick . In her armpits , the students come across extrusion of the ellipse - shape lymph nodes , part of the immune system that protect the body .

They sharpen out these characteristic to Hoagland .
“ Aha ! ” he proclaim . “ The story is fare together . ”
Dissection shows how the human trunk exercise , but also how it give out and gives out in the remnant . In that sense , each cadaver is a mystery with its own set of clues .

Why might the vein be abnormally heavy ? Maybe a occlusion of some form , Hoagland suggests .
“ It ’s like a garden hosiery . If you step on it , the fluid backs up . When you have a heart attempt , the vena in your neck opening bulge and your expression turns disconsolate because blood is punt up . ”
The inflame lymph nodes , he says , “ probably meant she was fighting an contagion . The guest were getting big and larger , compressing the axillary vena . ”

In another calendar month , each of the 36 dissection groups will find out the causal agent of demise for its cadaver . Until then , they research for clues .
At the same sentence , author Mark Johnson take in that these are very driven students who are dealing with the stresses of school lives , and that their gross anatomy test is n’t just about reverence for the body and what it teaches them ; it ’s also about grade . At the same clock time , the act of dissection color their lives outside the schoolroom in ways they did n’t expect .
But the students are n’t the only stars of the series . It also follow Geraldine “ Nana ” Fotsch who , along with her husband Bill , decided to donate her torso to the Medical College of Wisconsin . Fotsch has her own cause for donate her body , and her own hope and dreams for her soundbox ’s function after dying . Her altruism and notion of the beauty of human dissection is stirring , and a poignant fellow traveler to the experience of the scholarly person in the lab .

For more about donating your torso to medicine , translate our own Annalee Newitz ’s account,“I Donated My Body to Medicine . ”
https://gizmodo.com/i-donated-my-body-to-medicine-458382155
The serial publication is broken up into four parts and includes photos and videos of the students , Fotsch , and human dissection :

1.The First Cut2.The Living and the Dead3.A Heart in Your Hand4.The Weight of Her Brain
[ Journal Sentinel viaMetaFilter ]
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