Section 1 > The body in pieces
Once, as a medical student, I was sent down to the morgue where an autopsy had been performed. This too was part of our training, to follow all aspects of a patient's story to the end, dogging the facts like a detective. The pathologist showed me slices of liver, intestine and lung, all chock-full of Kaposi's sarcoma. Just the previous day, I'd been talking to that patient. I'd been in his room, jotting notes on his labs, his vital signs--the kind of information medical students are supposed to collect--when he told me he was going to die. He was 25 years old and didn't look all that bad. At that stage of my youth, I had a vaguely mythical sense of death, so I suspected he was exaggerating. Still, I had to say something. "Is there anyone—any family…?" I asked.
"Naw. My Mom lives in town, but she--she don't like AIDS."
I might have been the last person to sit with him at his bedside.
That's when I began to understand what intimacy was. A man sharing his loneliness. Next, his guts sliced like calamari on the metal pan.
The purpose of this section is to relate the anatomical body to our experience of personhood. The body we experience and the body
we cut into with our scalpels seem sometimes to belong to
different worlds. Art can bring the physical and imagined
body together, or create even greater distance
between them, forcing us to reflect on
how they connect or interact.
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