In the first week of medical school, my cohort was divided into small groups, given big sheets of white paper and assigned the task of drawing organs on a human outline, as our lecturer shouted “liver!”, “ovary … other ovary!”, “appendix!”, “spleen!” It was startling to confront our ignorance and the exercise was formative for me in retaining humility when talking with patients and being curious about what I call their “imaginary anatomy”: how we think our bodies look inside. Despite the smooth, slim, cross-sections we see on the walls of GP surgeries, each of us has this imaginary space that is of interest not only in its deviation from textbook “truth”, but because the idea of our innards affects how we feel about ourselves and what we think our bodies can do for us. This might explain why I chose to become a psychiatrist rather than a surgeon.
As Gabriel Weston writes in Alive, surgeons tend to think they “own anatomy”. Weston is herself a rare breed of surgeon, having read English at Edinburgh University before reckoning with her single biology O-level to join a new course for humanities students who wanted to become doctors. This made her “the least qualified medical student in the country”. Her “soft, arts-loving brain” had to pass as a scientist – an outsider status I share – which got easier once Weston became fascinated by the operating theatre and the “peachy slit” of the scalpel’s opening incision. It’s an obsession that is still evident everywhere in her writing. But she never lost her belief that medicine is dangerously resistant to seeing the body as more than mechanism, the person as more than a case.
