The Anatomy Museum

I was on a professional visit to Manipal University, near the temple town ofUdupi recently. I was taken around to the many institutions of the university bya very genial public relations officer, Vidya Pratap. I went to a couple ofmedical colleges, the technology campus, the communication school, the lifesciences school etc. There was nothing extraordinary about these visits, it waspredictable and routine for a journalist. But my visit to one place in theuniversity town stirred me for days and nights. Even as I sit down to writeabout that place, I can experience torrents of emotion and unreason. I amreferring to the 55-year-old anatomy museum of the Kasturba Medical College,which has been set up to teach medical students the intricacies of the humanbody.

Like the other institutions that she wanted me to see, Vidya had this museum tooon her list and just led me into it one afternoon. Even as we stepped in sheasked for the curator, but was told that the person had not returned from lunch.So we were left to have a quiet communion with the nearly one thousand truespecimens of the human body. As an afterthought, the curator's runningcommentary would have interfered with the solemnity of the communion. Thespecimens were classified into brain, head and neck, thorax, abdomen, pelvis andthe limbs. One has to walk in a serpentine line to see these specimens preservedin huge glass jars filled with formalene solution. This place, where you seeevery single part of the human body sliced and arranged is, for the record, thebiggest in Asia and was developed by one Dr. Godbole.

The chaos that can be unleashed in the mind when one sees parts of the humanbody -- which could once breathe, feel and touch -- mounted like artwork issimply enormous. They start appearing like reflections of your working brain,moving hand, belching stomach, seeing eyes and the stretching spine. You realisethat conceit and contortion, sadness and the sagging mood, ecstatic surges andcalm joy are all hidden in similar interstices of the brain or are running inthe labyrinth of the nerves that you so clearly see in the specimens. Certainimportant nerve routes in the specimens were coloured red, yellow and blue bythe curator. How interesting to give them colours! You unknowingly start talkingto them and they begin to whisper.

Strangely, in this anatomy museum, you have to often remind yourself that it ismeant to be a place of science and not art. That it is a place where method,reason and only rationality triumphed. If natural decay was life's surrogate inthis museum, then there was formaldehyde to induce stillness and create anin-between state. The trainee doctor who comes and sits before these specimensfor hours to make notes has a defined utilitarian engagement with it. He or shecan't perhaps imagine what kind of clasp and warmth the specimen hand containedwhile alive or what fine mind the brain in the formalene jar was or would theybe interested in reconstructing life out of the neatly torn pieces like in afolktale. It is not a place where you can engage yourself emotionally with thecurves and colours you see in the jars as you may do when you stare at exhibitsin an art gallery. But then I wondered why should I be in this museum to seekknowledge or satisfy my curiosity about the human body? For a moment I feltreason too had the stubbornness and dogma of ideology. That science too was anideology and that one would appreciate this museum better with some unreason andemotion. So I journeyed back to my father's death.

There was a hand in one of the jars that had thick, untrimmed nails, with astout thumb just like that of my father. My father's nails were so thick that itcouldn't be gripped and cut with a nail cutter. He always employed his used 7O'Clock shaving blade to do the job. The nail-cutting ritual would invariablyhappen on a Sunday morning immediately after his bath and surely before hisbreakfast. The logic he offered was that having soaked in water the nails wouldbe relatively soft and trimming them wouldn't be a bloody mess. It was always ananxious moment for me to watch him cut his nails, because the double-edged razorblade was a precarious affair and more so because he was a diabetic. But I neverremember the blade making even the slightest incision on his skin. He cut hisnails so round and clean that they hardly needed any filing. It was an art byitself. Even the day before his death, a Thursday, he had mentioned that cuttingnails on the following Sunday was on his 'must do' list. But on his death, hisnails remained untrimmed. Since his body too was given to a medical college, Isuspect that his hands too must be preserved in a pretty formalene jar with thenails intact. Soaked in formalene, how soft would the nails get? Well, that wasthe only question that I asked my unsuspecting host.

But before I end, let me complete the museum story. Adjoining the anatomy museumthere is a pathology museum and this one has far greater number of specimens,about 2600 or so. I walked in and started looking among many damaged hearts ondisplay for the one which had suffered 'myocardial infarction.' Nothing elseinterested me. Professional trips, many a time, are not so professional afterall.