Anatomy of the Dead

One of the highlights of my teacher training in San Francisco was that we were taken to Samuel Merritt College in Oakland. To meet the dead. Or, I see dead people tour to quote my yoga teacher. I did not know what to expect as we were told this is not for everyone and people were asked to eat light or skip it. And, every reaction from the wanna be yoga teachers would be normal. We all reached there early in the am. The person in charge of the lab read paragraphs from Siddhartha and Bhagavad Gita and how we need to thank them (the dead) for the offer of studying them. In short, we were not allowed to say anything inappropriate about the dead was the message. We wore thin gloves, divided ourselves into small groups and off we went inside.

We entered the ice cold room and the smell of formaldehyde was pretty strong. The bodies were not suspended in formaldehyde, I had expected something like that. All of them were covered with a white cloth. The lab manager said a prayer again and lifted the cover off. It was not scary to me, the dead man was chemically processed, dissected to show a certain parts of the body.  They were placed on some special beds, just like normal people, except they were quite processed.They were dissected to show certain system like the circulation, digestion or the organs.

For the first time in my life, I actually held a heart and brain. The brain definitely was one of the interesting things. Until this lab, I had always imagined the veins and the arteries to be very thin, small, closer to invisible tubes. I think I mixed it up with the nerves. I was surprised to see the veins and the arteries were quite big, a fully capable plumbing system. The nails were pretty long for most of the bodies.

It was interesting to see the different joints up close. The pelvis, the knee joint, the ankles, the shoulder joints. The spinal structure was quite spectacular as well. As there was no blood involved, none of it looked scary. My classmate kept telling me that the flesh looks like chicken’s. We were not supposed to say anything weird, but I agreed with him. It did look like chicken flesh in a bigger scale.

It was indeed a great anatomy class. We checked out all the muscles that we hear so much in western yoga. The  hamstrings, semitendonosis, biceps femoris, psoas and others. There must have been ten bodies that day, all dissected in different ways. Even though I was wearing gloves, the smell of formaldehyde stayed on for days after that. I also felt like there must have been some small tiny bits from the cadavers that somehow left with me. May be it was just psychological, but I did thank all of them for allowing me to see them up close.

This clip is only for the brave.

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