Body of Knowledge: One Semester of Gross Anatomy, the Gateway to Becoming a Doctor - Softcover

Stephen, Giegerich

 
9780684862088: Body of Knowledge: One Semester of Gross Anatomy, the Gateway to Becoming a Doctor
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0684862085 ISBN 13: 9780684862088
Verlag: Simon and Schuster, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Medical Gross and Developmental Anatomy is the course every medical student dreads. As one aspiring physician described it to journalist-author Steve Giegerich, "it's the bridge you have to cross if you want to become a doctor."
Four lab partners facing that notoriously difficult course at Newark's University of Medicine and Dentistry are Sherry Ikalowych, a former nurse and mother of four; Jennifer Hannum, an ultracompetitive jock; Udele Tagoe, a determined Duke graduate of Ghanian descent; and Ivan Gonzalez, a Nicaraguan refugee and unlikely medical student. This lively chronicle of each of their ambitions, failures, and successes has at its center Tom Lewis, the cadaver lying before them to be dissected. From their first face-to-face encounter with Lewis as an anonymous cadaver on the stainless steel table to a rich reverence for Lewis's generous donation of his body to science, what they each learn about medicine, compassion, life, and death makes for a fascinating insiders' account of the shaping of a medical professional.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steve Giegerich is a journalist and a member of the adjunct faculty at the Columbia University School of Journalism. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998, he resides in Locust, New Jersey.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

At mid-morning on Tuesday, April 1, 1997, a late-model station wagon, ordinary but for the smoked glass obscuring its rear windows, turned from South Orange Avenue into the main entrance of the New Jersey Medical School parking lot. From the driveway, the car made a hard left, descending immediately down a ramp leading to a submerged loading dock.

Because the height of the dock accommodated trucks, not cars, the driver parked off to the side. Unlatching the tailgate, he slid his delivery from the vehicle. Workers in another venue might have been unsettled by what emerged from the cargo hold, but in this environment no one paid the slightest attention. Here, dead bodies were a matter of course. Every day, someone was either coming -- into the embalming room operated under the supervision of the NJMS anatomy department -- or going -- the dock also served as the dispatch point for undertakers retrieving the deceased from the medical school's sister institution, Newark's University Hospital.

Once the collapsible gurney was removed from the station wagon, the driver clicked the stretcher into position and wheeled it up a foot ramp and through a set of automatic metal doors warning away all but authorized personnel. Inside the building, he approached a second authorized personnel only sign, where he pressed the buzzer outside a brown, windowless metal door.

Twenty seconds later, the door swung open. "Got one for you," said the driver, handing a folder to a stocky man in his early sixties with the erect posture of a military veteran. The driver, an employee of Funeral Service of New Jersey, a company dedicated to the transportation of human remains, ignored a surge of air redolent with chemicals. Pulling the gurney behind him, he entered a room cast in drab institutional yellow, its purpose distinguished by two stainless-steel cribs with drainage basins, each flanked by a pair of fifty-five-gallon chemical drums. In the corner, next to a third table, stood a fixed eighteen-inch single-blade jigsaw.

Roger Faison accepted the folder and tossed it onto a countertop. Excusing himself, Faison returned to the room a moment later with a medical school stretcher onto which he and the driver transferred the body. Plucking a receipt from the folder, Faison signed it and slipped it to the driver, who was on his way out the door within five minutes of arrival.

Faison thumbed absently through the folder and considered his schedule. It was a slow week; the students were gone, as were most of the faculty. Along with the medical researchers and support staff, Faison usually remained behind during spring break. He didn't mind staying put. In fact, he rather liked having the place more or less to himself, if for no other reason than it decreased the number of emergencies, real and imagined, requiring his immediate attention.

Through the years, Faison had used the respite to catch up on paperwork and other assorted tasks that tended to be pushed aside while, in the laboratory one floor above, the first-year students were enmeshed in the medical school initiation known as Gross and Developmental Anatomy. From January through April -- desiring to acclimate the students to the rigors of medical education early, NJMS, unlike the majority of medical schools, scheduled the mandatory gross anatomy curriculum during the second semester -- chaos was the order of the day, every day. The pandemonium would resume the following Monday; until then, Faison set the pace. He put off the embalming until Wednesday.

Faison wheeled the gurney into a walk-in refrigerator. One hundred eighty-five corpses, most wrapped in clear plastic bags, lay inside. All but ten rested on open-shelved compartments arranged in a grid twenty-five rows across and seven rows deep. The most recent arrivals were on gurneys, a temporary arrangement until space on the grid became available.

Embalming bodies for a medical school was not what Roger Faison had in mind when, in 1957, he applied his GI bill toward a degree in mortuary science. He had emerged from the navy a firm believer in the American dream, believing "all that crap that I read about economics in magazines about how if you work hard, the world is yours." In Faison's case, this meant becoming the owner and operator of the best funeral home in the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up, Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Fresh out of mortuary school, he landed an apprenticeship and began to expand himself academically. Understanding that mortuary wasn't the only science he'd need in order to make a name for himself in the funeral industry, Faison enrolled at Fordham University. Four years later, he departed with a degree in economics.

A submariner at the height of the cold war, Faison's navy stint only heightened his sense of adventure. In the navy, there had been exhilaration in spending weeks tracking Soviet submarines below ocean surfaces. In business, the thrill came in the pursuit of financial success.

Traditionally, in small towns across America and especially in the South, the black community revolved around the churches and the mortuary. The local undertaker was a professional, a man of dignity and grace, a man who, before civil rights laws prevailed to change the scope of race relations, served as the nominal link between his community and the prevailing white power structure. Brooklyn, which, in the early 1960s, still prided itself on being the biggest small town in America, was no different. With a gentle demeanor that masked a droll sense of humor, Faison settled into the niche. His business took off. Bed-Stuy brought him its dead; he, in turn, provided compassion and understanding, services he brought with him also to Manhattan's Upper West Side after borrowing the money to open a second parlor there.

Back in Brooklyn, a borough with a population larger than all but a handful of the country's biggest cities, Faison conceived a plan he hoped would appeal to the huge untapped market residing in Bed-Stuy's tenements and housing projects. Knowing a funeral could be arranged for far below the going rate, $1,000, Faison launched a marketing campaign, papering the projects with leaflets guaranteeing a complete funeral, sans burial expenses, for $500. Citing a law prohibiting such a blatant form of advertising, state regulators told him to knock it off. The competition took an even dimmer view, twice phoning bomb threats to Faison's mortuary within an hour of a scheduled funeral. Faison took the hint and reverted to the standard fee assessed by the city's other mortuaries.

Economics, the very subject he'd gone out of his way to master, proved to be his downfall. When, in the early 1980s, conglomerates began buying up New York mortuaries en masse, Faison refused to sell and gamely tried to compete. With the advantage of volume economics, the bigger companies eventually undercut the competition; in other words, the same economic theory that two decades before had brought Faison bomb threats was now turned against him. In 1986 he gave up, sold the funeral homes, paid off the banks and moved to New Jersey and a job immune to the trials imposed by the free-market system.

Embalming at NJMS brought with it a different set of predicaments. In the private sector, embalming emphasized presentation -- the undertaker's objective, on behalf of the deceased, was to create a lifelike appearance engineered to last for the intervening period between death and burial. At the medical school, aesthetics went out the door; preservation became paramount. Faison no longer cared what the bodies looked like; his only concern was to ward off decomposition. The bodies in a Gross and Developmental Anatomy laboratory had to last fourteen weeks lest Faison incur the wrath of faculty and students alike.

Each year, at their own request, the donated bodies of nearly a...

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Verlag
Simon and Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0684862085
ISBN 13 
9780684862088
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
276
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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