Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab [Paperback]

Christine Montross (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 27, 2008

A ?gleaming, humane? (The New York Times Book Review) memoir of the relationship between a cadaver named Eve and a first-year medical student

Medical student Christine Montross felt nervous standing outside the anatomy lab on her first day of class. Entering a room with stainless-steel tables topped by corpses in body bags was initially unnerving. But once Montross met her cadaver, she found herself intrigued by the person the woman once was and fascinated by the strange, unsettling beauty of the human form. They called her Eve. The story of Montross and Eve is a tender and surprising examination of the mysteries of the human body, and a remarkable look at our relationship with both the living and the dead.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (May 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143113666
• ISBN-13: 978-0143113669
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #95 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Reference > Education & Training

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Though it never goes for the gross-out effect, this memoir is not for the squeamish. "You begin to learn to heal the living by dismantling the dead," says Montross, and though her recollections encompass all of her medical training, the narrative backbone of the story is her semester-long dissection of a human cadaver, from opening up the ribcage to removing the brain from the skull. Montross was a poet and writing teacher before she decided to become a doctor, and she peppers her account of the dismantling of her cadaver, Eve—so named because she has no belly button—with arresting imagery: to test the heart's semilunar valves ("little half-moons that work passively and without musculature"), she and another student take the organ to a sink and run tap water through it. Performing her own dissection leads Montross to explore the history of studying anatomy through corpses, which brings tantalizing detours to medieval Italian universities and saints' shrines. But she also recounts her earliest encounters with living patients, such as a heart-wrenching consultation with a man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, who can communicate only by blinking. Her thoughtful meditations on balancing clinical detachment and emotional engagement will easily find a spot on the shortlist of great med school literature. (June 25)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"[Raudman's] tone, like Montross's writing, is often irreverent and dryly funny, without ever being disrespectful." ---AudioFile

--This text refers to the MP3 CD edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (May 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143113666
• ISBN-13: 978-0143113669
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #95 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Reference > Education & Training

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A physician without knowledge of anatomy is not a physician, so we need to know what "anatomy" is... July 2, 2007

By R Schmidt VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, by Dr. Christine Montross, jumps out as something entirely predictable... what you would get if you crossed writers Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge) and Atul Gawande (Complications).

In other words, Montross writes with knowledge and determination, passion and persuasion, connection and compassion.

During her first year in medical school, her most important dissection partner was a deceased woman she named Eve. Whatever Eve did in life, in death she shaped Montross forever. Montross marveled at Eve's lack of a belly button, the bone dust Montross inhaled, the wonder of Eve's gift of herself. Eve morphed into a totally dissected person, and to the end, Montross would always consider her a person, not a thing, and not an abstraction.

This experience, along with vignettes from her rotations in medical school, are shared throughout the book. But Montross goes beyond that, delving into the history of anatomy, of human dissection, and of our linkage of what remains after we die with our spiritual connections. There's a reason saints were delivered in many pieces to places of worship, that medical students resorted to grave robbery, and that Thai medical students respect their dissection experiences throughout their career.

Montross weaves her anatomy experiences with her own life and relationship. There is a sensitivity here that makes you want to choose her as your own physician. By golly, if I am brain dead, I want Dr. Montross to check my pain reflexes! Finally, there are a number of books about that first year experience in medical school, and they all share the spirit of discovery in anatomy.... This one goes where others have not, and reflects Montross's background as a teacher of English and a poet... observations of anatomy through the MFA lens.

This is a great book to give that person who yearns to follow her into the healing professions. Read more ›

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Medical Humanity Even At The Dissection Table August 5, 2007

By Robert A. Warren

Format:Hardcover

A first-year medical student remembers with clarity and thoughtfulness one of the great emotional traumas of medical school, the semester-long process of dissecting a cadaver. This could read like a recital of atrocity, or worse. Instead, without muting the emotional trauma that comes with disassembling every square inch of a human body, Dr. Montross focuses on her growing emotional bond with 'Eve.' The result is a remarkable symbiosis between the living student and her deceased 'instructor.' The author's style is direct, even confrontational at times; this isn't for the squeamish or faint of heart. But Montross never fails to treat her subject with respect and dignity, even honor. It is a devastatingly dense relationship within the stifling confines of the gross anatomy lab. But as the author makes clear, it is absolutely necessary for a young doctor's training. Here, the medical student/author emotionally dissects herself while reducing 'her' cadaver to, well, nothing. The process, however gory it might sound, is beautiful, revealing - literally and figuratively - and results is great empathy between 'physician' and 'patient.' As one destroys the other in her search for knowledge, they bond in a way that can only be described as beautiful and tender. This book gives the reader who is open to it an altogether different understanding of doctors and the medical profession. The profession is the better for Dr. Montross's explanation of the process by which she became a doctor.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars memories July 20, 2007

By James S. Wicoff

Format:Hardcover

Just finished this book. Had to stop several times because of memories of my medical school and residency years. Cried some, laughed some and nodded my head often. What I liked was that this was not simply a memoir , but an intriguing look at medical history and practices in other countries. I am a child psychiatrist and part time poet, so I identified on many levels. I was the reader at our table-2 prospective surgeons took over the dissection. The emotions of becoming a doctor are wonderfully described and I will recommend it to fellow physicians and prospective ones alike. Beautifully done.
Jim Wicoff m.d.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A thoughtful semester with a cadaver named Eve August 4, 2007

By Lynn Harnett TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

First year med students learn anatomy by spending a semester, 14 hours a week, dissecting a cadaver. Issues of cultural taboo, squeamishness and professionalism necessarily arise. Montross, who, at 28, had already been a poet and a teacher, chooses this profound experience as the backbone of her memoir on becoming a doctor.

Older than most of her classmates, she has a stable, happy relationship and a wider, more mature perspective than, say, gung-ho Raj, fresh from college, who can't wait to start cutting. Montross herself is much more ambivalent and approaches her team's corpse with curiosity about its life.

With their first view of her, their cadaver furnishes her own name - Eve. The old woman has no belly button! Montross takes us through her team of four's first cuts - the trepidation, ambivalence, feelings of inadequacy and amazement. She also tells us how it feels to put scalpel to embalmed flesh, to saw through bones and softer tissue.

"The muscle and cartilage are much easier to saw, but, as a result, doing so lacks the distraction that effort affords. The tissue spins off the blade in small bits, which look like tiny roots or fingernail clippings."

Graphic descriptions of the layers of flesh and muscle, the intricate and ingenious, but messy and confusing circulation system, the distinct and functional organs, fascinate and repel. Montross describes the process of normal decay after death - but the medical cadavers could remain at room temperature for 20 years without further decay.

Taking periodic breaks, she explores the history of medical cadavers: body snatchers and religious taboos, the early scientists who donated their own bodies, and the condemned prisoners donated by the state....

She visits the historic dissecting theater at Padua, which probably had a table that flipped, so if officials approached the forbidden corpse could be hidden below, while an animal appeared in its place. Montross reflects on the dedication of those early doctors and students who risked disgrace, prison and even death for the acquisition of knowledge.

Another visit takes her to Rome, to the crypt of the Capuchin monks, maintained and added to from 1631 to 1870. The bones of 4,000 friars have been meticulously preserved in a series of chapels. But far stranger than the skeletons still standing in their habits are the chandeliers of arm bones and clavicles hanging from the ceilings, the filigree of ribs decorating the doorways, the wreaths of pelvises and backbones displayed on the walls.

Clinical detachment has always struggled with cultural or emotional taboos and Montross returns again and again to her own efforts to balance feeling and professionalism throughout her med school experience. "My ability to manage my own discomfort in the face of their bodies and their illnesses would be one of the most critical lessons of my medical training."

She tells of treating a non-responsive patient day after day, going through the motions, her thoughts elsewhere, until one day she comes in to find his walls festooned with a child's drawings and family pictures and the man is transformed from chore to human being, though nothing about him has changed.

At the other end of the spectrum, having followed a patient for some time, she approaches the family to discuss end-of-life issues and bursts into tears.

The author's grandparents were also declining during her first year. "I was aware that my own personal grappling with the body's ability to heal and fail colored the ways in which I approached my medical studies."

Her studies seemed removed from real life; her knowledge inadequate, yet she knows there is no cure for aging. She could trace the path disease and injury had taken: "But in what locatable space was the reason the tissue did not heal?"

Ever thoughtful in her feeling, ever feeling in her thinking, Montross communicates the hopes and the limits of medicine, the strivings and pitfalls of doctoring. Honest and informative, Montross' first book ranks among the best of medical memoirs. Read more ›