Another Medical Poem

[Nick Capozzoli]

Here's another one:

Necropsy

We enter the room, donning masks
Against contagion. The pathologist,
Gowned in white, opens the chest
With great shears like the stuffed breast

Of a Christmas turkey. The lungs deflate
And fill the room with the meaty breath
Of a butcher’s shop. Delayed in death,
Dark blood drips through the steel grate

My patient’s body lies upon.
Grown numb at last the pliable clay
From which the spirit had lately run
Parts easily on its final day.

[AuntShecky]

This one does a pretty good job of sustaining the conceits of meat, poultry, and the butcher's shop. The metaphor "like the stuffed breast/ of a Christmas turkey" is in a position in which it modifies "great shears" rather than "chest," though.

By the bye-- not to be too facetious-- but if I decide to leave my body to science, will that help out my surviving relatives by eliminating the cost of a funeral and/or cremation?

[Nick Capozzoli]

This one does a pretty good job of sustaining the conceits of meat, poultry, and the butcher's shop. The metaphor "like the stuffed breast/ of a Christmas turkey" is in a position in which it modifies "great shears" rather than "chest," though.

By the bye-- not to be too facetious-- but if I decide to leave my body to science, will that help out my surviving relatives by eliminating the cost of a funeral and/or cremation?

I see your point. I guess I could fix the ambiguity with better punctuation, for example by putting a comma after "shears" in line 4. Thanks for pointing this out!

As regards leaving your body to science, that's up to you. It would free your relatives from having to dispose of your body. So far as I know, most of the bodies "left to science" wind up being cremated. In the old days there were Potters Fields where unclaimed bodies were buried. All of the bodies that wind up in med school and other college anatomy labs have been "donated to science." That certainly beats the old standby, grave robbing. There is, however, a fine point that most folks are not aware of. Anatomy lab cadavers must not have been autopsied, so folks who die and leave their bodies to science have to escape the legal need for a coroner's autopsy. This limits the number of corpses suitable for anatomy lab dissection...

So if you want to save your relatives funereal expenses, and if you feel that having your embalmed body dissected by med students is worthwhile, then feel free to chose that route. Your body will serve to educate physicians, and when they are done dissecting it, your body will be cremated (most med schools have a nice and solemn ceremony for this).

There is another option, which is to sign an organ donor card, with specific instructions that your body parts be used to treat people who would benefit from those body parts. After your useful organs have been harvested, your relatives can still claim what remains of your body for cremation or burial. I'm not sure if this option is available for folks whose bodies end up in anatomy labs.