Hands and Feet

   "Mentally, it is tough cutting into the foot because I know how sensitive my own feet are.  Cutting into any part of my body could hurt, but there is something about the feet (as there was about the hands) that makes me squirm at every poke." 


---Marcus 


   "Today we did the hand.  Now I am on the crosstown bus back to the West Side, and I can't stop looking at people's hands.  I feel like tapping someone on the shoulder and saying, 'I know what it looks like inside there---it's beautiful!'
     What incredible organization:  it's simple and complex at the same time.   I strum the back of my seat with my fingers and try to visualize all that is going on inside, like which muscle groups are involved, which nerves, and the order of their electrical commands. I think of my son and how small his hands are and how everything is there functioning, but in miniature.  It's miraculous.  And then I remember backing into our cadaver's rigid left hand, splayed open, palm-side up at the end of his outstretched yellow arm."


---Michael

Journal entries from first year medical students in Gross Anatomy class.  Excerpted from
Anatomy of Anatomy: in images and words (2000)  by Meryl Levin