Not for the squeamish, but an eye-opener for would-be doctors.
For one first-year medical student, dissecting a cadaver brings about not just intimate knowledge of a human body but a personal transformation.
Montross, writing this memoir in her final year of medical school, finds herself “performing previously unthinkable actions in order to discover wondrous and previously unimaginable realms.” She reports in vivid, often poetic detail the physical, mental and emotional demands of meticulously taking apart the dead body of a woman she calls Eve, an experience that enthralls her, exhausts her, gives her haunting dreams and teaches her human anatomy as no textbook could. Beginning with the chest and ending with the head, she and three classmates painstakingly explore parts of Eve’s body, learning to identify organs, muscles, tendons, blood vessels and nerves. For those who have never been there, this is uncomfortably close to the real thing. It is tedious, smelly and demanding work, but at the same time an essential task for medical students and for Montross an especially rewarding one. The summer after her anatomy lab course ends, she travels to Padua to see where Vesalius performed his historic dissections—illustrations from the anatomist’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica introduce each chapter—and to Bologna to see the collection of wax sculptures used for teaching anatomy in the 18th century. Going beyond personal experience, she discusses the myths and superstitions surrounding dead bodies, and she provides a capsule history of cadaver supply from the 16th century on, including the Scottish “resurrectionists” Burke and Hare, who went from grave robbing to smothering to provide medical students with fresh bodies. Other themes explored include the process of dying, the ethics of medical training and the emotional difficulty of dissecting a cadaver.
Not for the squeamish, but an eye-opener for would-be doctors.Pub Date: June 25, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59420-125-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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