First Cut: A Season in the Human Anatomy Lab
by Albert Howard Carter
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Book Summary Information
Author: Albert Howard CarterEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-07-15
ISBN: 031219546X
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Picador
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780312195465
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of First Cut: A Season in the Human Anatomy Lab
Book Review: First Cut
Summary: 5 Stars
The author, not having followed his youthful dream of going to medical school, and now a professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, attends as an observer an anatomy class and its dissection lab at Emory University in Atlanta. The book, illustrated by reproductions of woodcuts from Andreas Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica of 1543, follows first year med-students' literally-hands-on introduction to human anatomy. The students are not portrayed with any psychological detail; they are only lightly sketched, little more than names at the dissection tables. The focus is on the cut and opened and dismembered body, not on those who study it. In a sense, the book reports the author's vicarious experience, by observing the students and the cadavers throughout the progression of their dissection, of being a med-student himself. This, of course, is the intrigue of the book: the reader, too, vicariously, is present.
Summary of First Cut: A Season in the Human Anatomy Lab
With humor, compassion, and wisdom, Howard Carter recounts the semester he spent watching first-year medical students in a human anatomy lab. From the tentative early incisions of the back, the symbolic weight of extracting the heart, and by the end, the curious mappings of the brain, we embark on a path that is at once frightening, awesome, and finally redemptive.
Many of us have heard stories about ghoulish medical students and the pranks they play using arms, heads, or other parts "borrowed" from the cadavers in their anatomy labs. Like most urban legends, these stories are both compelling and untrue, telling us more about how we imagine the world to be than how it really is. First Cut contains the observations of a humanities professor allowed to watch medical students struggle with the challenges presented by their first anatomy class. Carter tracks, and mirrors, the students' progress from initial nervous joking and unwillingness to touch the bodies to familiarity and respect for their "silent instructors," culminating in an end-of-term Service of Reflection and Gratitude.
As he sees changes "in personal feelings about death, touching, and the wonderfully complex activities of the human body" in the young men and women, he also puts to rest the memory of his father, who had donated his body for medical study. Pacing the story are three inspired essays on the nature of medical education and thirty beautiful and absorbing Renaissance anatomical illustrations. First Cut, far from being a sensationalistic account of young doctors run amok, is perfect for anyone who is interested in understanding medicine and its practitioners. --Rob Lightner
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