Montross Quotes

Montross describes the first day, when she gets the bone box. She thinks while she is walking with the box; “This used to be a person. I am carrying parts of a person in this box, and no one knows it. On the street, girls compliment one another’s shoes, and a man in his twenties sings Dylan n the curb for quarters.” (9) Montross has begun her journey to becoming a doctor. She first needs to learn about all the different bones in the body. I feel that as I read this passage about the bone box and all the bones, I could really picture all the bones in front of me. Montross recalls, “Inside is a whole skull, at once eerie and beautiful. On close inspection the individual bones on the skull are visible, and their lines are fluid and lovely—the
winging curl of the zygomatic bone that can be traced from the cheekbone to the ear, the bony hinge of jaw, the whorled external acoustic meatus, through which sounds travel to our brains.” (9) From an emotional standpoint, Montross shows that she enjoys examining the skull, even though she knows it once was part of a human. Montross knows that the skull can’t feel anything and that’s why she doesn’t mind examining the skull. Montross describes the first time she ever walked into the lab and saw the cadavers. She describes it as, "I try to assess the form on the table without touching it, only looking at the way the thin, white, zippered plastic bag encases it, and I decide it must be a female form. Many of the bodies are unquestionably male, due to postmortem erections that make an odd tent shape in the bag." (18) Montross observes that some of the cadavers are males, while some cadavers you can't really tell until you open the bag. She figures out that her cadaver is a female by the shape the bag encases it. I can understand what Montross is saying and I can picture having to deal with it with her. Montross can her people making jokes about their cadaver when she first goes into the lab, but she doesn't understand why they are joking about it.
She says, "I have heard jokes about anatomy groups naming their cadavers 'Woody.' At the moment it is hard for me to picture--I feel far from being able to joke about any of this." (18) She feels like seeing people joking about their cadavers isn't something you should do on the first day in the lab. Montross also feels really overwhelmed about everything in the lab and ends up forgetting to get her name tag. I wouldn't go around joking about a cadaver the first day I was in the lab, I don't think I could ever joke around about a cadaver. Christine describes what the heart looks like in the body now that the lungs and ribs are gone; "The heart muscle itself does not look so much different from chicken--a little stiffer and grayer, perhaps--so, as we attempt to clear out the blood and embalming fluid, we cannot tell the difference between the flesh and the blood." (33) Her group feels like their tearing into this woman's heart. With this description, I feel like I was part of her group as the tried to get the blood out of the heart without tearing too much of the heart
out. Christine and her group don't like the way they have to clean the heart. "Occasionally we come across wide, thick tubes of hardened blood, and red-black crumbles of it cover everything. We try to run water through the vessels, and the pieces of blood clog the drain of the lab sink. The white cloth covering the body is now dirty and stained, as is the body bag, and the feeling of imprecision and carelessness is exasperation." (33) Christine feels like they are destroying the cadaver's heart. She doesn't like the fact that their table looks imprecise and careless, because they’re really not being careless or imprecise. Montross describes the bits of skin, fats, and other unneeded pieces from the body; "Beneath each of the dissecting tables in our lab hangs a shiny stainless-steel bucket into which skin, bits of fat, and other unneeded pieces from the body are discarded. The buckets are never emptied over the course of the semester, and we are told to scrupulously place into them anything we remove from the cadaver." (69) Montross doesn't like the scrap bucket because she doesn't know when it's going to be filled and they can't put any more scraps into the bucket. After reading this passage, I wouldn't like the scrap bucket either or I would want at least two scrap buckets. Montross knows that the scrap bucket is just a gesture for the families; "The theory is that when the body is cremated at the semester's end, it will be cremated in its entirety. Perhaps the idea comforts potential donors and their families. To us, however, the buckets are haunting." (69) Montross feels like the scrap buckets are haunting but knows that without them, the medical field might not get any cadavers. She really tries to put all the scraps into the bucket but it is impossible that all the scraps end up in the bucket. She doesn't want Eve's family to think that they didn't do what they were suppose to do with the scraps.