I believe that all humans who have access to education should be required to learn about what exists inside our bodies and how they work. Isn’t who we are also what we are? I approached human anatomy and physiology more as a discovery of myself. There was this deep-rooted desire to explore each groove of the vertebrae and each curvature of the organs. I knew that in class we were learning a basic template for the body, and that in reality, each individuals’ anatomy had its own features that made us unique, such as the shapes of our skulls or the muscular divots in our backs.
One way I experienced this was during the pig heart dissection. I compared my pig heart, which was tightly packed with adipose tissue and had narrow pulmonary arteries, to a classmate’s, which in turn had a large aortic arch and clear coronary arteries that wrapped around the base. We concluded that these characteristics were not only important in making each individual pig, or organism in general, unique, but also because it gave us information about its superficial appearance and the life it had.
We further challenged this idea on a skull we had in the laboratory. The date of the skull and the presence of a rare sutural bone suggested the person was indigenous to a certain Peruvian tribe that has been historically known for sutural bones and laboratory donations. Additionally, the loss of teeth in the skull implied that the person had been a mouth breather, which was further explained by a crooked nasal bone, which had potentially been broken during his or her life time. As I continued to compare the special characteristics that distinguished each individual’s anatomy, I was brought back to this feeling of curiosity about myself.
It struck me that, although I saw the class as more of a self-discovery, I would never actually be able to see these unique features that made up my own body on the anatomical and physiological level at which I was learning about them. In fact, the only people that had the opportunity to actively witness and handle the billions of possible variations our bodies take are surgeons. On January 31, Obstetrics and Gynecology Specialist Dr. K. Nathan Parthasarathy presented as a guest speaker and talked a little about the benefits of being a surgeon. One especially powerful story he told was about perhaps the only man ever to have safely handled and observed his own deep anatomy. Leonid Rogozov, 27 years old at the time, was the only surgeon stationed at the Soviet base in Antarctica in 1961. He had the misfortune of getting appendicitis and, being the only surgeon, saved his own life by performing an appendectomy on himself. Dr. Parthasarathy mentioned Rogozov’s story to make the point that a doctor is not more skilled because he or she has had the experience, and therefore, empathizes with the patient. If this is true, I thought, then a skilled physician must be the product purely curiosity, and originally, the innate desire to understand the self.
January, 2018 – Annabelle Fischer
