Strange Interlude, 2008: Return to sender

     Well, I did something Thursday that I have not yet done in 2020: put on pants. Which is my subtle way of saying the recuperation proceeds apace: slowly but surely. I also began reaching out to sources for what I hope to be my first column when I return. Small steps. 

     I stumbled upon this looking for something else, and liked it for two reasons: one, a reminder that a dozen years ago email used to be far more significant than it is today. And for my visit to the Rotary which, needless to say, never asked me back. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I including the godawful joke I coined about Barack Obama at the end because it seems cowardice to delete it. What is the old saying? Dying is easy; comedy is hard.

OPENING SHOT ...

     Every few seconds, the computer on my desk emits a pleasant three-note glissando chime — do-do-dooo — telling me another e-mail has arrived.
     Well, it was pleasant 20 minutes ago. Now, it's getting annoying, as dozens, then scores, then hundreds of messages arrive, all announcing that my e-mail has failed to reach its destination and is being returned.
     Not that I'm sending them—I'm writing a column, or was trying to. Now, I'm deleting e-mails by the hundred. A bank of computers somewhere — some musty basement in the Ukraine, or a stifling, windowless warehouse in Nigeria — is "spoofing" me, using my e-mail address to send out thousands of scam e-mails touting an online casino. "Are you our next massive jackpot winner?" it asks. 

      No, I'm not. Not me. This is nothing personal — they have digital spiders crawling over the Web, grabbing e-mail addresses and using them to try to fool computer filters into thinking an actual person is writing to them.
     And even though my involvement is accidental, there's something disquieting about having the fallout from this attempted ripoff collecting in my inbox. I don't know why I feel moved to delete it immediately — but I do. I want it out, as if it were diseased, or might drown me.
     I wish some of those sociologists studying Yanomamo Indians in the Brazilian rain forest and nomads in the Punjab would instead cast their attention to what being connected 24 hours a day into this enormous, often-enigmatic grid does to people, to all my plugged-in friends, frantically thumbing their BlackBerries as they walk down the street. I'm all for the Internet, but, like The Phone Company, it has its dark corners. From the froth-flecked lunatics who, unlike objects in the rear view mirror, appear much closer than they actually are, to the vile extremes of humanity only a few keystrokes away, to being bothered in your office by electronic scamsters a dozen time zones removed.
     So I delete and delete and delete and delete. It isn't terribly difficult, and there is a sense of sweeping away the bad. It's almost like weeding. At first.

LIFE AMONG THE ROTARIANS

     With phantom rejected e-mail messages clogging my in-box, I hopped a cab to the Union League Club for a Rotary Club of Chicago luncheon.
     If Facebook is new networking, then this is old networking — flesh-and-blood people with their names on big round badges, gathering at round tables to exchange business cards and chat before listening to whatever speaker was snared into accepting the job — in today's case, me.
     My hunch is that many people cling to a Sinclair Lewis view of groups such as the Rotary, the Elks and the Lions. A half-censorious, half-sneering sentiment left over from after World War I, when fraternal groups were the hidebound sentinels of Main Street status quo. With perhaps a bit of lingering 1960s scorn tossed in, a relic from when change was in the air, and anything that smacked of business was bad. The Rotary was The Man.
     But young people are entrepreneurs now, or want to be, and it's easier to name billionaires under 30 than it is to name rock stars. After exchanging banalities with your "friends" — Facebook code for people you've never met and most likely never will — a Rotary Club meeting feels positively revolutionary: real people in a real room, talking about their common bonds.
     George J. Kondik, a visiting Rotarian from Weirton, W.Va., seemed genuinely pleased that I know Weirton is the home of National Steel, though he probably wouldn't have minded being spared the reason why — that I took a bus there, with my high school girlfriend, to celebrate New Year's Eve 1979 at her sister's house.
     "That's where I first saw cable television," I said, with a bore's attention to detail. "Because of the mountains."
     Brian Sabina, just 24 and seemingly interested in helping people, despite having graduated from Northwestern, explained his new philanthropic group, "Reach the World." Jean-Hui Yao was the first college student I met who has a business card announcing the fact that she'll receive her master of science from Medill in December.
     Yes, none of us is a titan of industry — I'm not George Will, and none of the people digging into their beef stew were Warren Buffett. There was more than one toupee in evidence, and the general tone among the younger people was one of utter earnestness.
     But you have to grow where you're planted, and we can't all be Bill Gates and George Soros huddling in our Gulfstream Jetstars. There was a brief ceremony where visiting Rotarians — from Switzerland, from Taiwan, from Salinas, Calif. — presented little silk banners from their home Rotaries, and in turn received a banner from the Chicago Rotary, which is where the whole thing began in 1905.
     I like that. Any organization that exchanges little silk flags is all right by me. You can't do that online.
     Yes, there is a fleetingness to the social contact — the business cards inevitably go into a drawer, and are swept away at some future date. But when you are being inundated by a droid e-mail army of gibberish messages churned out by robot spiders, there's nothing like black coffee and sincere conversation to give you the strength you need to get back to the office and start deleting.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     The media has been noting that there are few Barack Obama jokes and no funny ones. The reasons range from the high hopes he inspires in his serious supporters, the frothing hatred in his detractors (it's hard to make a funny joke when you're foaming) to the additional level of complexity brought in by racial considerations.
     Does anyone out there have a good Obama joke? I tried to cobble one together and couldn't do any better than:
     If Barack Obama is such a big fan of change, then why is he always wearing the same suit?
             —Originally published in the Sun-Times July 23, 2008

Two royals decline to obstinately infest the stage

     "Even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations," the great James Thurber once wrote, "that of batting baseballs through the windows of the R.C.A. Building, would pall a little as the days ran on."

      A truth worth bearing in mind whenever someone steps down from what seems, at a distance, an enviable job, whether a professional athlete retiring early, a movie star giving up career for home life or, as happened midweek, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announcing they will "step back" from their duties as key members of the British Royal Family, and begin spending part of the year in North America, probably Canada.

     In case, like me, you don't follow the royals assiduously, Harry is Prince William's younger brother, the two making up the sons of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Queen Elizabeth II is Harry's grandmother.
      The 18 months since Harry's much ballyhooed marriage to NU grad Markle, apparently, have not been pleasant ones, the happy couple squirming under the microscopic gaze of the racist British tabloid media which, remember, is blamed for hounding Harry's mother to her death in Paris.

     It makes sense. There is something of the superfluous to their position already: Harry probably will never end up with his face on currency; he's just hanging around, in case he is ever needed.

     I can't gauge the reaction in England. But here the immediate social media reaction seemed to be general sympathy that each of us has only the one life, and spending it cutting ribbons and sitting on daises might become unbearable, no matter how fancy the car you drove up in. 

    There must be some pushback, from disappointed Brits who expect the royal family to be a perpetual circus conducted for their amusement, and it will not do for the acrobatic dogs and performing ponies to complain, never mind shirk their duties.  

     And I suppose there will be smirking that this is perhaps the ultimate example of Gen Y—Prince Harry was born in 1984—recoiling from the world of work, no matter how plush. Though the couple insist they are going to use their time to become "financially independent." The plan seems to be they will be working in some fashion, except for themselves rather than for the House of Windsor.

     A promising sign, perhaps. The entire democratic push against royalty over the past 300 years was predicated on the notion that we are not trapped by the conditions of our birth, but can build independent lives of our own choosing and, should we please, even change those lives at any point.  The implication was always that the pre0rdained roles being escaped were humble ones, but I suppose it should work similarly for the high born. The bottom line is, we can forge our own selves.

      Some of us can, or hope we can. It's difficult. We all have complicated relationships with work. Work is something we have to do, most of us, for the money. But it's also something we love, often, if we're lucky. For a lot of people, it's clock punching and grinding routine. Hard for me to imagine; since I'm blessed with a job I really love, while being at an age where the snug harbor is, if not looming before me, at least is a spot on the horizon. While I'm in no rush to get there, I do not dread it either. These past 10 days, recovering from surgery, have been useful in that regard. To my surprise, I haven't felt that desperate, if-you're-not-in-the-paper-you-might-as-well-be-dead feeling I typically get when stepping back from the column. Maybe because I'm too worked over, too tired, too focused on healing, on walking properly, and don't have have the energy or focus to write a decent column, this present bit of piffle notwithstanding.

     So when should I make the deep bow and exit? I figure I'll know the time when it comes; maybe a decade away, I hope. When I find myself facing fatigue that  a few weeks at home won't fix. Then a graceful exit will be something of a duty.

     As always, the Great Cham of Literature, Samuel Johnson, put it best.

     "He that is himself weary will soon weary the public," he wrote , when he brought his twice-weekly series of essays, The Rambler, to a close after two exhausting years.  "Let him therefore lay down his employment, whatever it be, who can no longer exert his former activity or attention. Let him not endeavor to struggle with censure, or obstinately infest the stage till a general hiss commands him to depart."

     That sounds like a plan, fit for commoners and royals alike.

       

Strange Interlude, 2003: The Art Institute of Chicago, Undocumented Industrial Polluter

     
     I haven't been on the editorial board for 14 years. And while I generally don't miss it—too many meeting about some monorail to DuPage County that's never going to be built—the duty was a source of occasional columns, such as this one about how The Art Institute of Chicago got itself on a list of industrial polluters operating without permit.
     I sometimes tell PR sorts that opening tale of trying to track down payment of the $1 yearly rental for the Chicago Water Tower. Except after the official finally blurts out that it's a line item, that an actual dollar bill never actually changes hands, I add my unvarnished thought at that moment, along the lines of: "I'd hate to tell a media professional her JOB... But if I had a representative of a major newspaper pestering me to see a dollar handed over so he could put run a story in the newspaper about all the worthwhile programs that I conduct there, I would reach in my purse, pull out a friggin' dollar, put in an envelope, and arrange a goddamn ceremony that he could see. But maybe that's Old School of me...."
     Anyway, the leg heals, slowly. Hope this is as fun to read as it was to write.
    

     The Chicago Water Tower—the limestone structure in the middle of Michigan Avenue, not the shopping mall—is actually still owned by the Chicago Water Department. That makes sense. The quaint structure was originally part of a pumping station, and the fact that it is really old, that it survived the Great Chicago Fire, or that Oscar Wilde took one look and called it a "fairy castle with pepper boxes stuck all over it" does not take the Water Tower away from the Water Department, which leases it to the Tourism Department for $1 a year.
     This odd tidbit of hidden Chicagoana haunted me, particularly that dollar fee. There was something wonderfully antique about the payment, like a jeweled falcon given in yearly tribute to the king. I wasted more time than I care to recall trying to track down exactly when and how that dollar changes hands. I pictured it as a matter of great pomp, like the appearance of Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day: the various assembled honchos from Water and Tourism in their top hats and sashes, the ceremonial dollar mounted in a frame, with lots of hands shook and photos snapped.
     That I had to see. (Despite the fad of making stuff up, I'm a big fan of factuality. The damning thing about the fabulists isn't just that they're lazy, but that their fictions are so dull.) For a while I had hope, since I was taking a two-track approach: through both the Water and Tourism departments. But neither bore fruit and finally, an exasperated official snapped, "It's a line item. They do it through bookkeeping. They don't hand over an actual dollar bill."
     The missing dollar came to mind when a young lawyer from the Sierra Club, during one of the deadly dull meetings that have come to fill my days like kudzu, handed over a list titled, "Major Sources of Air Pollution Without Operating Permits."
     The list had 194 companies with names like Bunge Grain Milling and Sterling Steel. I'd like to claim that my sharp eye caught this—that darn factuality again!—but it was my boss who, scanning the list, picked out from among the various soap manufacturers, zinc replaters, tool works and wet corn milling facilities, one polluter who, well, was kind of unexpected: The Art Institute of Chicago. Its purpose, "museum," listed among "soap mfg." and "steel tubing" and "boilers."

Reporters can be sadists

     There is a certain amount of sublimated sadism in professional journalism, and I must admit savoring the moment I placed the call to my old friend, Eileen Harakal, whose enviable job it is to promote the greatest museum in the Western hemisphere.
     She said she had no idea why the museum would be on the list but was appealingly defensive. "We have state-of-the-art solar panels on the roof," she snapped. "Why don't you write about that?"
     Exuding charm, or an obvious oiliness I consider charm, I promised her that, if she found out why the Sierra Club was lumping the home of "Nighthawks" with the Danville Metal Stamping Co., that I would give her solar panels their due.
     To her credit, rather than dodge me for the next week, as I expected, within 24 hours Harakal spilled the beans: A dozen years ago, the Art Institute installed a pair of 725-kilowatt co-generation engines designed to supply about a third of the museum's peak period electricity, plus steam for heating and cooling.
     This wasn't an emergency back-up kind of affair—the things ran 13 hours a day when the museum was open. Because the pair squeaked under the 1,500-kilowatt limit, no permit was required.
     But rules change. In December 1995, the museum was required to file an application with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Act permit program. Not precisely one to flout the dictates of civilized society, the Art Institute did so.
     Those readers who are of foreign nations waiting for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to process their citizenship papers might have a hint of what is coming.

Eco do-gooders smear city icon

     The passage of nearly eight years is not sufficient, apparently, for approval of the Art Institute's permit to be acted upon.
     "The IEPA has a large backlog of applications to review," said Harakal, taking a far more benign view than I would if failure of some IEPA bureaucrat to stamp my form was prompting the Sierra Club to travel from one Chicago media outlet to the other, tarring me as an undocumented polluter.
     Not that the museum runs the generators like it used to. In late 1997, Commonwealth Edison changed its billing formula, and now the generators are in use about 30 hours a year.
     On to those solar panels. The museum installed a 102.96-kilowatt photovoltaic solar panel system, making it the largest such installation in the state. Who says French Impressionism and ecological responsibility don't mix?
     Touching base with ComEd, I had to ask: Since the Art Institute generates electricity, does Com-Ed have any artworks it is proud of?

      "The headquarters of ComEd, Exelon, is in the Bank One Building," spokesman Tim Lindberg said. "That Chagall mosaic is outside." Turnabout is fair play.

                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 23, 2003

"Time goes on crutches"

       A Man on Crutches (1878) by Edouard Manet
                    Metropolitan Museum of Art

    After a lifetime of using crutches only metaphorically, to dismiss unseemly forms of support, it was odd to suddenly lean upon a crutch in a very real and literal sense.
     Not being a very rambunctious child, I never broke my leg, so never before last week had to wrap my hands around crutches, a pair of which I was assigned when leaving Northwestern Memorial Hospital with my new metal hip.
     The education started before I was rolled out the door, crutches held firmly before me, like a battle standard. I was not to support my weight on my armpits. 
    "There are a lot of nerves in your armpits and you can damage them that way," the physical therapist said. Rather I was to brace myself with my hands. Otherwise I faced woes common enough to earn their own names: crutch paralysis and crutch palsy. (The standard crutch is called an "axillary crutch," axilla being the technical name for your armpit. Good Scrabble word).
     Forearm crutches, considered more ergonomically sound, are more popular in Europe than here, where they've never caught on. 

Terracotta amphora, 480–460 B.C. (Metropolitan Museum)

     I found crutches easy to get around with, even on our many flights of stairs, when I transfer them to my free hand: one hand on the rail, the other holding the crutches as a kind of double-staff.
     Then yesterday, time on my hands, I considered the word "crutch," and played the game where I try to guess its derivation. Old, obviously, related to "crotch," no doubt, denoting the Y shape. Close. A thousand years old, spread through Old- and Middle-English, plus other Germanic languages—in Dutch it's kruk—the word is closer to "crook," as in shepherd's crook, and denotes bentness.  Through most of history a crutch was a Y-shaped stick.
      The first definition in my 1970s Oxford English Dictionary would never fly today: "1. A staff for a lame or infirm person to lean upon in walking." Setting aside the odd "in walking" usage—wouldn't "when walking" be better?—I figure "lame" must have gone by the wayside. And indeed, the online Webster's elevates crutch users to "the disabled." (Nothing like the definite article to denote official societal pity: "the disabled." "The homeless." I guess I should be grateful we aren't at "The journalists.")
     The OED has crutch as a verb, a form I never considered. "Up and down ... the various steps ... do we delight to crutch it," reads an 1828 reference. 

Crutches were used in Ancient Egypt

     The symbolic crutch starts cooking about 400 years ago. Crutch as code for age is all over Shakespeare. When old Capulet, in his dressing gown, comes upon a disturbance in the streets of Verona in the first scene of "Romeo and Juliet," he calls for his long sword, but his wife immediately shuts that down, saying, "A crutch, a crutch! why call you for a sword?" Thanks dear. 
    Although, to be fair, "crutch" is not always a negative in Shakespeare.
    "Lay hold upon him Priam, hold him fast," Cassandra urges in "Troilus and Cressida." "He is thy crutch, now if thou loose thy stay." 
    Crutch can also be a metaphorical verb, as in Dryden:  "Two fools that crutch their feeble sense on verse."
     I've leaned on "crutch" a few times myself.   In 2008, when John McCain was running for president, and brushed aside questions about how many homes he owns with a lofty reference to his North Vietnamese captivity, I wrote:

     "To say that, as a hero, he can put his heroism to work any way he pleases misses a crucial point: McCain is not the only hero. What about all the other men and women who served and suffered, proud individuals who face their daily challenges and do not whip out their heroism as a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card to blow off whatever mess they've created? Who don't cite their service when getting a traffic ticket? Doesn't McCain owe a duty to THEM, to wear his record with the grace and honor it deserves, and not transform it into a cheap political tool, already being mocked as 'a crutch' and 'the POW card.'

         Le Grand Opéra(1821) by Eugène Delacroix

     Crutches are one of those interesting devices that are blandly accepted in actuality—nobody snickers at you for using crutches—but distinctly negative as metaphor, a situation not found in other dual purpose words like "bandage" or "medicine." Using a crutch is never a good thing unless there's something wrong with your leg.
    The handsome aluminum pair I received were McKesson crutches, by the way, and if the name means nothing to you, don't feel bad, it meant nothing to me either. A sure sign of just how under-the-radar the enormous medical establishment really is.  With revenues of $208 billion, McKesson is No. 7 on the Fortune 500, down from No. 6 last year. Four of the top 10 companies on the Forbes list are in the healthcare industry, a reminder of exactly why Americans don't have national health care and probably never will: because it is very, very profitable that we don't.

No shortage of Iranian cultural sites for Trump to blow up

Nasir al-Mulk Mosque

    When President Trump said Saturday that the United States had targeted 52 important Iranian cultural sites—52 being the number of American diplomats taken hostage when the American embassy was seized in 1979—the sheer callous brutality of the threat cut through the recuperatory fog and caught my attention.
     If Iran reacts to our assassinating Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani Friday, they can expect national treasures at “a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture” will be destroyed, Trump tweeted. “Those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!”
     Threats like the one Trump was at that moment delivering, hypocrisy being one of our president's superpowers. Another being a constant ability to amaze. Really, you think you must be in the basement now, and an entire necropolis of baseness and loathsomeness opens up beneath your feet.
     It isn't that the United States is incapable of taking vengeance on cultural gems. The medieval Saxon city of Dresden, which survived most of World War II generally intact, was fire-bombed by the Allies in February, 1945, three months before the end of the European war, with a loss of 100,000 lives, not for any particular military purpose—though there were factories and rail hubs—but, it was believed, as a blow to German morale and as general payback for starting the war.
     But such acts are considered war crimes now, exactly because they were done in the past. Trump of course is utterly ignorant of such things, and stuck by his threats, using Iranian brutality as America's new moral compass.
     “They’re allowed to kill our people," Trump told reporters Sunday. "They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural sites? It doesn’t work that way.”
     The whine is a perfect example of what I call "terrorism envy:" "Awww, c'mon! They get to cut people's heads off! Why can't I? It's not fairrrrrrrr!" 
     Perhaps because the assumption that such threats are Trump's typical empty bluster and lies, I didn't notice anybody in the media pause to wonder precisely which cultural sites are in the crosshairs should Trump break precedent and actually follow through on something he insists he will do.  And what's the actual process for this? Did he assign some colonel to come up with 52 candidates?  And did that cringing underling then start pawing through old Rick Steves guides to Iran, looking for cultural destinations to demolish?

     If so, it wasn't a very difficult assignment. There are quite a lot to choose from.
 

Persepolis

   The ruins of the 2500-year-old city of Persepolis come immediately to mind. The ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire is one of 24 UNESCO World Heritage sites in Iran, and a reminder that it has hosted civilization back nearly 10,000 years, to the Assyrian and Mesopotamian empires. It wouldn't take too many cruise missiles to level those old stones. 
     Iran has dozens of museums, including museums focusing on electricity, music, and carpet. It also has a peace museum, whose eradication would be one of those gaslighty touches that Trump sometimes revels in.

     My guess is that Trump isn't thinking—to stretch the term—about blowing up ruins, or museums, but in his ganglional clump of a mind, "cultural" is a code word for "religious." There are hundreds of significant mosques in Iran, some of surpassing beauty, such as the Nasir al-Mulk Mosque in Shiraz, shown at the top of today's post. I picked it for its sheer loveliness, rather than any deep history. It was built in 1876, at the height of that country's embrace of the West, and it would be ironic if it got one of Trump's missiles, which is another form of Western influence, I suppose.  

      There are also many shrines, like the 1100-year-old shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, conveniently close to the border with Afghanistan. 

     A man of Trump's intellect should not be underestimated. There is no reason why destruction of Iranian cultural sites need be limited to Iran, whose legacy has spread across the globe. 
     The University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, for example, has a gorgeous human-headed winged bull from the court of Sargon II.  No need for a difficult air attack launching expensive ordinance: Trump could dispatch a few federalized Illinois National Guardsmen with sledge hammers to break the thing up, or use dynamite, like the Taliban blowing up the Bamyan buddhas. The destruction could also be a blow against another perennial enemy, the City of Chicago. Extreme? Sure. But if terrorists get to do it, why not us? 

Surgical Notes #5—2010: Loyola anatomy lab illustrates shortage of medical cadavers

Torso of a Male Cadaver, by Eugène Delacroix
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Six days post-surgery, and I'm doing ... fine. Not too much pain, getting around the house on crutches, haven't gotten the okay to go outside yet. The physical therapist has been here twice, to stretch the new hip. I'm doing my exercises, sort of. I've mused on starting up writing on current topics—the Trump administration seems to have started a war with Iran, for instance, and is now threatening to attack Iranian "cultural," aka religious, sites. 
     But you don't need me to trill "Woe!" over that, or whip out a felt board and laboriously explain Why This is Bad. You get it.
    The bottom line is, I'm in an odd, rare, twilight, I-don't-feel-like-writing-anything-right-now-thank-you state. Must be the meds, which I've already begun to dial back, though I understand their connection with the thing not hurting too much. The bandage covering the incision—and this I did not expect—is nine and a half inches long. Check a ruler if you have trouble envisioning just how long that is. The bandage comes off Monday, and I can't say I'm eager to see what's underneath. But this is all about moving forward, gingerly. Anyway, I might try a stab at something new Monday. So one final day of the end of my visit to Stritch, which started yesterday. Thank you for your patience. If your comment did not get posted last evening, I may have accidentally deleted one that I meant to post, so please re-submit. It wasn't a conscious rejection. 


     The rope is a surprise.
     In the hour that Dr. Frederick Wezeman spent preparing first-year students at Loyola University's Stritch School of Medicine for what to expect in gross anatomy when they cut into their first patient—a medical cadaver—many issues were covered, from the importance of not wearing open-toed shoes (scalpels can fall) to the need to wear latex gloves (embalming fluid can irritate the skin) to the value of working as a team.
     He didn't mention the rough brown rope tied tightly around each corpse's chest.
     "Let's lift him up a bit," says a first year, feeling along the rope. "It's a sailor's knot."
     At each of the 20 stations, students introduce themselves to one another and cope with the ropes used to move the cadavers. The rope leaves a deep impression in skin already flattened from the bodies lying on their backs, as tissues lose pliability after death.
     "That's crazy," says Steve Zuniga. "I didn't know they get flat like that."
     Today's task for 150 students is to expose the trapezius—a large muscle in the back, named for its trapezoidal shape. The reason students start there, as opposed to any of the other 640 muscles in a human body, is that it is large and thus hard to miss or ruin.
     They position the bodies using sections of wood beam—worn, blackened blocks that seem at odds with the medical setting.

The 1885 Illinois Cadaver Act allows it

     David Neubauer consults a big red Gray's anatomy atlas, then returns to the body.
     "This is the sacrum," he says, cutting along the spine from the nape of the neck to the small of the back, exposing a layer of yellow fat under the skin.
     How did the group pick him to go first?
     "I had the scalpel first," he says.
     I wanted to be here under the assumption that students dissecting for the first time would find it difficult. But while some admitted to nerves in Wednesday's column, there was no sign of emotion in the room. I never saw a student so much as wince.
     "We jumped in," said Anthony Rutkowski.
     Dr. Wezeman, the course director and professor who has been teaching at Loyola for 30 years, says students today are far less squeamish than students in the past.
     "They're ready for it," he says. "They're exposed to blood and guts much more than when I was growing up. When you watch TV you see a lot of medical things that are pretty graphic, so they're not as shocked when they come into a cadaver room."
     Though TV can't explain it all, as students leap to tasks not seen on prime time.
     Issra Rashed, 21, wordlessly takes a paper towel and removes some waste left behind when a cadaver was inadequately washed.
     "Didn't want us all looking at it," she says.
     The cadavers cost $1,500 and come from the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois.
     Loyola students must crowd eight to a body, in two teams of four, as they work because cadaver donations have been falling.
     "Quite a bit," says Paul Dudek, executive vice president of the association. "Twenty-five years ago we had 700 to 800 donations. So far this year, we've had about 330."
     Dudek blames the growing popularity of cremation and pre-need funeral packages. Driver's licenses also once had a box allowing you to donate your body to science
     "That for some reason was dropped," says Dudek, adding that he could easily place twice as many cadavers as he receives — he gets requests from as far away as England and the Caribbean — but that the supply bottleneck might finally be dissolving.
     "The 1885 Illinois Cadaver Act allows medical schools to request individuals buried at public expense," he says. The association has recently worked out an agreement with the Cook County medical examiner's office and the County Board so that some of the county's 500 yearly unclaimed bodies of indigents can be sent to them. Prisons might be another source.
     "We're pretty excited about it," he says, using an adjective that might sound odd, until you realize the joy of learning involved.
     Watching the first-year students work is Oma Lawrence, 26, a fourth-year from Hawaii.
     "They'll all go home today and reflect," she says. "I remember my first cadaver — a lady. I can actually still picture her nerves. You can't help but be a little queasy."
     Or maybe not. A few days later, I speak with Emily Zepeda — a doctor's daughter from St. Charles who had enthused, "I can't believe I get to learn this!"
     "Today was amazing," she says, describing how midweek the students took turns using a bone saw to expose the spinal cord.
     "I was a little scared, at first," she says, of handling the Stryker saw. "But it truly was like getting to see a treasure."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 22, 2010 

Surgical notes #4—2010: Anatomy students meet their first patient

De humani corporis fabrica (Of the Structure of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius
   (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

   
     You don't always come into a story at the beginning. When I first visited gross pathology lab at Loyola University's Stritch School of Medicine, it was December, 2009—the end of term. I was pleased with the column, posted here last year, but wanted to see students at the beginning of the semester, when they first met their cadavers. So I returned the following October and produced today's and tomorrow's columns. 
     I give myself credit for going back, because seeing the flayed apart heads—think onion blooms—mentioned in that first column, lingered with me, and not in a good way. I remember, one night shortly after doing the research, in bed, staring up into the darkness thinking, "It's bad enough to have trouble sleeping, but do I also have to be awake and see the FACES OF THE DEAD?!?"
     Not to complain. These columns were my idea. Part of being a professional is, you gird your loins and do the task in front of you. Which has been helpful, post-surgery, such as every morning when I have to inject myself in the stomach with a hypodermic of anti-coagulant, to ward off blood clots and strokes. Do I like it? No. But I do it, before breakfast, to make sure I get it out of the way. 
    Anyway, I hope you enjoy these columns from a decade ago, and appreciate your patience while I convalesce. 

      It isn't as if Emily Zepeda, Hannah Johnson and Lisa Moore have never seen a dead body before. They have.
     "When I interviewed here, they took me around," says Moore, 23, as the others nod.
      Still, the women are nervous. "First-day jitters all over again," Moore says.
     "You do hear stories," says Johnson, 22, "about people who have to step out of the room to avoid fainting."
     "The room" is gross anatomy lab at Loyola University's Stritch School of Medicine. Every October, each first-year medical student goes from being someone who wants to become a doctor, who may have volunteered at a hospital or gone overseas on a medical mission, to someone who can take a scalpel and peel back the skin on a corpse.
     "This is unlike anything we've ever done before," said Johnson. "Some of us have taken some form of anatomy class in undergrad. But this is completely different."
     "This is anatomy," said Zepeda. "This is what every medical student has been doing since the beginning."
    But first, a steeply sloped lecture hall, lights dimmed, a setting straight out of a Dutch engraving, where students sit in 11 tiers. On the screen: "Human Gross Anatomy, Structures of the Human Body."
     "Good morning and welcome," says Dr. Frederick Wezeman, professor of orthopedic surgery and the classic grey-haired, white-coated image of what a doctor should look like. "We have a very full day for you."
     He crosses his arms, gazing at the room.
     "So what are we going to do?" says Dr. Wezeman. "We're going to be doing a lot of identification, of locations and relationships. You have to know your anatomy. What you learn might seem tedious and detailed to the point of 'Why do I have to know that?' Yes, you do have to know that."
     Almost every student has a laptop, some are already studying charts of skeletal and nerve systems. One is on Facebook.
     "We're going to teach you to speak a new language here," Dr. Wezeman says. "You're going to be talking anatomy. Obviously, dissection is very, very important. Lectures are important, you are paying $42,000 in tuition and you want to be able to learn in different modalities."
     He leads the students through the practical considerations of cutting up a body: wear gloves, no cameras, no souvenirs.
     "You can't take anything out to scare someone at Halloween," he says.
     Students must keep their cadavers moist.
     "If it dries out, you'll have to tag dried-out structures," he says.
     The cadavers are not idealized human bodies, but unique, real individuals.
     "Not all cadavers are normal," he says. "We will encounter a lot of surgical intervention, you will encounter pathologies, you'll encounter situations that you're going to scratch your head about. But they're wonderful learning tools. . . . All the things that normally occur in populations. They're going to be downstairs.
     "Some of them are obese. That's going to create an additional challenge. Be aware. Turning a cadaver over is a team effort. We don't want cadavers falling on the ground."
     Dr. Wezeman reviews the muscle system in the back where the students will first cut.
     There is a brief ceremony—three students come to the front of the lecture hall and speak eloquently to the former owners of the bodies waiting for them downstairs, describing the hands that caressed new babies, the lips that smiled and kissed.
     "These are not merely bodies, they have become our teachers," one student says.
     Then the students head downstairs, to change into scrubs, and enter a very bright white room where 22 body-sized white plastic bags are waiting on tables. There is another ceremony—the students bow their heads, fold their purple-gloved hands in front of themselves, praying.
     If Loyola seems to go overboard thanking the cadavers and stressing respect, remember there is a long, ghoulish history to gross anatomy that includes both grave-robbing and comic photographs of cadavers taken by medical students in the first half of the 20th century. That mind-set is long gone, and Loyola intends to keep it that way.
     The prayers done, the room shifts into commotion as students collect forceps and hemostats from large white buckets that once held Schwartz's premium pickles and take their positions around their cadavers.
     Emily Zepeda happens to be by the zipper, open to reveal a curled foot of indescribable color—a deathly greenish white with yellow toenails, arched at an unnatural angle. She reaches for the zipper and pulls.

      Postscript: Dr. Emily Zepeda is a pediatric ophthalmologist in Oklahoma City. Dr. Lisa Moore is in family practice in Glenview. I couldn't find any information on Hannah Johnson. 

     

    Part one of two parts.  To read Part 2, click here.

              —Originally published in the Sun-Times Oct. 20, 2010