Goodbye Vesalius

They were not humble. Their subject, they told us, was by far the most ancient of medical sciences yet still the foundation of all modern clinical practice.

They were not, however, all-powerful. Their curricular time had just been cut from 900 to 500 hours: a setback they bore with fortitude, simply teaching the same stuff almost twice as fast. But they were still, they told us quietly as exams loomed, the gatekeepers of medicine. No one could proceed without knowing vast amounts of minute detail about the bedraggled, reeking corpses over which they presided.

Fresh from a year in sub-Saharan Africa, I thought I detected, as might any modest 19 year old amateur anthropologist in the circumstances, a rite of passage. That helped. Our cohort would be stressed, mystified, bullied, degraded, and eventually—with a few exceptions—found worthy.

Meanwhile, we trooped to practicals and lectures. A sad woman with a prosthetic right upper limb explained the mitral valve. “Just like a bishop's mitre …” She held up a normal hand and a metal claw. “… as those of you with two hands can easily demonstrate.” A retired surgeon confided to small groups the convoluted secrets of the greater omentum, using folds in the lapels of the lab coat of the nearest student—somehow always female—to make his point.

A smiling junior answered all questions by quoting verbatim whole chunks of the official textbook in response to the stimulus of key words—anticipating the principles of the CD ROM by some 25 years. And daily the star lecturer launched upon his late morning peroration via sentences that lengthened steadily, the approaching release signalled by the most breathtakingly audacious grammatical construction of all—encrusted with ornately worked parentheses and featuring not only serried flying buttresses of subordinate clauses but echoing transepts of noun phrases in apposition too—which led at last to a dying fall, mass exit to the Men's Union and lunch: pie, beans, and chips.

Gone, all gone. A brief note in the university's financial recovery plan indicates that the anatomy department is no more. Elements of the subject will be taught in context as the need arises. But recent advances in anatomy, by Vesalius and others, will all no doubt still be freely available on CD ROM.