فصل 09

کتاب: آن هنگام که نفس هوا می شود / فصل 10

فصل 09

توضیح مختصر

  • زمان مطالعه 0 دقیقه
  • سطح خیلی سخت

دانلود اپلیکیشن «زیبوک»

این فصل را می‌توانید به بهترین شکل و با امکانات عالی در اپلیکیشن «زیبوک» بخوانید

دانلود اپلیکیشن «زیبوک»

فایل صوتی

برای دسترسی به این محتوا بایستی اپلیکیشن زبانشناس را نصب کنید.

متن انگلیسی فصل

9

You would think that the first time you cut up a dead person, you’d feel a bit funny about it. Strangely, though, everything feels normal. The bright lights, stainless steel tables, and bow-tied professors lend an air of propriety. Even so, that first cut, running from the nape of the neck down to the small of the back, is unforgettable. The scalpel is so sharp it doesn’t so much cut the skin as unzip it, revealing the hidden and forbidden sinew beneath, and despite your preparation, you are caught unawares, ashamed and excited. Cadaver dissection is a medical rite of passage and a trespass on the sacrosanct, engendering a legion of feelings: from revulsion, exhilaration, nausea, frustration, and awe to, as time passes, the mere tedium of academic exercise. Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society’s most fundamental taboos, and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito. Eventually, as you complete your assignments by dissecting the median nerve, sawing the pelvis in half, and slicing open the heart, the bathos supersedes: the sacred violation takes on the character of your average college class, replete with pedants, class clowns, and the rest. Cadaver dissection epitomizes, for many, the transformation of the somber, respectful student into the callous, arrogant doctor.

The enormity of the moral mission of medicine lent my early days of med school a severe gravity. The first day, before we got to the cadavers, was CPR training, my second time doing it. The first time, back in college, had been farcical, unserious, everyone laughing: the terribly acted videos and limbless plastic mannequins couldn’t have been more artificial. But now the lurking possibility that we would have to employ these skills someday animated everything. As I repeatedly slammed my palm into the chest of a tiny plastic child, I couldn’t help but hear, along with my fellow students’ jokes, real ribs cracking.

Cadavers reverse the polarity. The mannequins you pretend are real; the cadavers you pretend are fake. But that first day, you just can’t. When I faced my cadaver, slightly blue and bloated, his total deadness and total humanness were undeniable. The knowledge that in four months I would be bisecting this man’s head with a hacksaw seemed unconscionable.

Yet there are anatomy professors. And the advice they gave us was to take one good look at our cadaver’s face and then leave it covered; it makes the work easier. Just as we prepared, with deep breaths and earnest looks, to unwrap our cadaver’s head, a surgeon stopped by to chat, leaning with his elbows on the corpse’s face. Pointing out various marks and scars on the naked torso, he reconstructed the patient’s history. This scar is from an inguinal hernia operation, this one a carotid endarterectomy; these marks here indicate scratching, possibly jaundice, high bilirubin; he probably died of pancreatic cancer, though no scar for that—killed him too quick. Meanwhile, I could not help but stare at the shifting elbows that, with each medical hypothesis and vocabulary lesson, rolled over this covered head. I thought: Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder wherein one loses the ability to see faces. Pretty soon I would have it, hacksaw in hand.

Because after a few weeks, the drama dissipated. In conversations with non–medical students, telling cadaver stories, I found myself highlighting the grotesque, macabre, and absurd, as if to reassure them that I was normal, even though I was spending six hours a week carving up a corpse. Sometimes I told of the moment when I turned around and saw a classmate, the sort of woman who had a mug decorated with puffy paint, tiptoeing on a stool, cheerfully hammering a chisel into a woman’s backbone, splinters flying through the air. I told this story as if to distance myself from it, but my kinship was undeniable. After all, hadn’t I just as eagerly disassembled a man’s rib cage with a pair of bolt cutters? Even working on the dead, with their faces covered, their names a mystery, you find that their humanity pops up at you—in opening my cadaver’s stomach, I found two undigested morphine pills, meaning that he had died in pain, perhaps alone and fumbling with the cap of a pill bottle.

مشارکت کنندگان در این صفحه

تا کنون فردی در بازسازی این صفحه مشارکت نداشته است.

🖊 شما نیز می‌توانید برای مشارکت در ترجمه‌ی این صفحه یا اصلاح متن انگلیسی، به این لینک مراجعه بفرمایید.