In 1976, I walked into the McIntyre Medical building at McGill to register for my first year of medical school.
In the line I ran into a guy I knew slightly in high school. He looked at me with great surprise. “What are you doing here?” he asked. I explained I’d been working in women’s health for a few years and that Dr. Kinch, the chief of ob-gyn, wrote me a letter of recommendation. “Aha,” he said. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know!”
With that ungracious welcome, I began.
The next morning, we walked to the Strathcona Anatomy & Dentistry Building. Nothing was ever more consciously designed to impress upon people that they were being inducted into a secret society than that limestone and marble pile. The building was directly across from the Royal Victoria Hospital and resembled it as a mother resembles her offspring. The walls were dark panelled wood, the many pillars of the vaulted ceiling were adorned with the names of famous McGill physicians and anatomists. The marble steps up to the anatomy lab had depressions where generations of feet had passed and the stained glass window we walked by commemorated the sacrifices of McGill physicians and students in the first world war. The entire mise en scene linked us intentionally to a proud tradition.
We would attend lectures in the panelled lecture hall, struggling to copy the meticulous chalk drawings made by Dr. Leblond on the blackboard. He always wore a purple tie, stained with the dye he had invented himself. His excited voice described the intricacies of sperm development or compared the histology of the nephron to the feathered fans of the famous dancer Zizi Jeanmaire.
The drama continued as we entered the anatomy lab. The domed structure was surrounded by windows, filling the space with natural light. In the anteroom we would wash our hands in the circular fountain sinks with a grainy soap that never lathered, gowned and gloved.
Around the room were rows of dissecting tables, each table graced with a preserved body, reeking of formaldehyde. In small groups, arranged alphabetically, we would cut and probe and separate layer after layer, trying to identify the structures Dr. Osbourne and the other lecturers had explained to us. It was exhausting and painstaking and I was not good at it. When my husband, Dave, picked me up after class he would wrinkle his nose as I entered the car. “Ah,” he would say, “Eau de Cadavre!”
It was in anatomy class that I learned that I could no longer study the way I had as an undergrad. My usual technique, of reading over the material a few times and making notes, was wholly inadequate for the level of detail now expected of me. I got 39% on that first exam and had a panic attack. My friend, Peter, and I developed a study system together. On our free days, he would arrive at my house at 8:30, where I had coffee waiting. He would bring a bottle of diet Coke. All day, in a caffeine-fuelled frenzy, we would quiz each other on the thousands of details. Peter had an excellent ability to suss out what the dreaded essay questions would be on the exam. “Describe the path of the femoral nerve and the muscles it innervates,” he said. “That’s got to be the essay question, just got to be!”
In order to stave off starvation, one evening Dave roasted a whole leg of lamb for our dinner. When he came back from doing errands, he found the two of us dissecting the roast, laughing because we had discovered that sheep didn’t have a Sartorius muscle. “Of course they don’t,” said Peter, “Sheep don’t cross their legs!”
With Peter’s help, my anatomy marks rose to an acceptable level. I passed through the purgatory of basic sciences and into the clinical years, where application of that knowledge and the meanings of the 5,000 new words we had learned began to make sense.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries anatomy was the queen of medical sciences. It was the key tool that we used in the ongoing and central quest of medicine: to understand the body, and to apply that understanding in the healing of the sick. Now that primacy has moved to other sciences. So has the role of anatomy in medical education. McGill, still quite conservative, does have some hours in the dissection room, although it is integrated into a systemic approach, and much of the learning is done through prosections. At University of Montreal gross anatomy has been reduced to an elective. So anatomy is a much less important component of undergraduate medical education.
We are still on that quest: to understand the body and link that understanding to everything else we need to know to become doctors of medicine and masters of surgery.
Yet I wonder, does walking into that building still evoke that sense of awe, the magic of joining a lineage of healers? Can a building even do that? I think it can.