This piece was written to be read at a memorial service held at the completion of Gross Anatomy by the College of Medicine Class of '98. The memorial service was held to honor those people who had donated their bodies for dissection.

The first dead body I saw was my grandfather's. I was maybe 10 yrs old when he died. We went to see him at the funeral home the night before his service. I remember a couple of things very clearly from that experience. One was the group of old ladies (his friends I guess) standing near the entrance to the room where his body was laid out. They were talking in low tones and as I passed them I heard one of them say, "He looks well." That's an Olde English/Yorkshire way of saying that he looked pretty good. Of course that struck me as particularly ironic as he had just died. A few seconds later I realized it was a preposterous lie.

My grandfather's body looked horrific. He had died of cancer and his skin was stretched over the bones of his wasted face and he wore a grin full of pain and suffering. My mother leant down to kiss his face. Yet more horror. How could she do that? At the time I assumed it was from some tremendous sense of obligation; why else would she touch, especially with her lips, something so repulsive and so far removed from what/who my grandfather was?

The next time I saw a dead body was during an interview for medical school. As we entered the dissecting room I thought of my grandfather and wondered if I would feel the same repugnance I had felt twenty years earlier. I did.... for about five seconds and then I was overcome with fascination for what I saw. Part of the arm of the body had been dissected and there, laid before me, was the incredible complexity which is the human hand. Actually, I had no idea then just how complicated it is. Many many many many hours of painful studies have corrected that little misconception.

And so to gross anatomy at MUSC. I'll always remember the first day at the gross lab. We waited outside the room joking nervously, trying to be cool. Maybe everybody else was cool, but I know I was just trying. We went inside and made our way to our assigned tables. I always smile when I think of one of my lab partners who for just about the entire first lab stayed as far away from our cadaver as possible, pressed against the wall wearing a quite unique grimace. What a contrast when just a couple of months later that same lab partner leans casually on her cadaver, nonchalantly picks up a coil of intestine and says jejunum, right? Seems like a transition from the terrifying to the mundane. But it has never been that, not mundane. I think that always, at some level, there was the awareness that these cadavers were once people.

I got a reminder of that recently. I looked into the morgue one night and noticed a body, unusually, wrapped in a white sheet and strapped to a stretcher. My curiosity was piqued and so I went to take a look. The first thing I looked at was the tag on the toe. I was surprised and disconcerted to see that this man had only died two days before. Why was I disconcerted? I pulled back the sheet covering his face and was again taken aback. I thought, after two months of dissection, that I was hardened to the impact of seeing a dead body, but this man was different. He looked as though he could sit up and walk away. He did actually "look well." Then another thought struck me. He was so recently dead that in all likelihood there were people who were at that very moment deep in grief for this lost loved one.

And the point to my little ramble? I'm not sure there is one. I don't have anything particularly profound to say. We all know that these people were once living breathing, crying, laughing, angry, passionate people. That they gave a wonderful gift to a group of people whose predecessors had to rob graves for the same privilege we have enjoyed. AH! There's the rub, there's the point. It has been my rare privilege to dissect a human body and to the donors I offer two things: Firstly, a promise - to always honor their memory by trying to be the best doctor I can and secondly I offer my deepest thanks. Simply that, "Thank you ".

Nicholas Batley