I was on a professional visit to Manipal University, near the temple town of Udupi recently. But then, professional trips, many a time, are not so professional.
I was on a professional visit to Manipal University, near the temple town of
Udupi recently. I was taken around to the many institutions of the university by
a very genial public relations officer, Vidya Pratap. I went to a couple of
medical colleges, the technology campus, the communication school, the life
sciences school etc. There was nothing extraordinary about these visits, it was
predictable and routine for a journalist. But my visit to one place in the
university town stirred me for days and nights. Even as I sit down to write
about that place, I can experience torrents of emotion and unreason. I am
referring 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 human
body.
Like the other institutions that she wanted me to see, Vidya had this museum too
on her list and just led me into it one afternoon. Even as we stepped in she
asked 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 true
specimens of the human body. As an afterthought, the curator's running
commentary would have interfered with the solemnity of the communion. The
specimens were classified into brain, head and neck, thorax, abdomen, pelvis and
the limbs. One has to walk in a serpentine line to see these specimens preserved
in huge glass jars filled with formalene solution. This place, where you see
every single part of the human body sliced and arranged is, for the record, the
biggest in Asia and was developed by one Dr. Godbole.
The chaos that can be unleashed in the mind when one sees parts of the human
body -- which could once breathe, feel and touch -- mounted like artwork is
simply enormous. They start appearing like reflections of your working brain,
moving hand, belching stomach, seeing eyes and the stretching spine. You realise
that conceit and contortion, sadness and the sagging mood, ecstatic surges and
calm joy are all hidden in similar interstices of the brain or are running in
the labyrinth of the nerves that you so clearly see in the specimens. Certain
important nerve routes in the specimens were coloured red, yellow and blue by
the curator. How interesting to give them colours! You unknowingly start talking
to them and they begin to whisper.
Strangely, in this anatomy museum, you have to often remind yourself that it is
meant 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 in
this museum, then there was formaldehyde to induce stillness and create an
in-between state. The trainee doctor who comes and sits before these specimens
for hours to make notes has a defined utilitarian engagement with it. He or she
can't perhaps imagine what kind of clasp and warmth the specimen hand contained
while alive or what fine mind the brain in the formalene jar was or would they
be interested in reconstructing life out of the neatly torn pieces like in a
folktale. It is not a place where you can engage yourself emotionally with the
curves and colours you see in the jars as you may do when you stare at exhibits
in an art gallery. But then I wondered why should I be in this museum to seek
knowledge or satisfy my curiosity about the human body? For a moment I felt
reason too had the stubbornness and dogma of ideology. That science too was an
ideology and that one would appreciate this museum better with some unreason and
emotion. So I journeyed back to my father's death.
There was a hand in one of the jars that had thick, untrimmed nails, with a
stout thumb just like that of my father. My father's nails were so thick that it
couldn't be gripped and cut with a nail cutter. He always employed his used 7
O'Clock shaving blade to do the job. The nail-cutting ritual would invariably
happen on a Sunday morning immediately after his bath and surely before his
breakfast. The logic he offered was that having soaked in water the nails would
be relatively soft and trimming them wouldn't be a bloody mess. It was always an
anxious moment for me to watch him cut his nails, because the double-edged razor
blade was a precarious affair and more so because he was a diabetic. But I never
remember the blade making even the slightest incision on his skin. He cut his
nails so round and clean that they hardly needed any filing. It was an art by
itself. Even the day before his death, a Thursday, he had mentioned that cutting
nails on the following Sunday was on his 'must do' list. But on his death, his
nails remained untrimmed. Since his body too was given to a medical college, I
suspect that his hands too must be preserved in a pretty formalene jar with the
nails intact. Soaked in formalene, how soft would the nails get? Well, that was
the only question that I asked my unsuspecting host.
But before I end, let me complete the museum story. Adjoining the anatomy museum
there 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 on
display for the one which had suffered 'myocardial infarction.' Nothing else
interested me. Professional trips, many a time, are not so professional after
all.