Description:

Catherine Belling, PhD
Associate Professor
Medical Humanities and Bioethics
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

The First Monster: Acknowledging Horror in the Anatomy Lab

What happens if we approach the anatomy cadaver not as an instrumentally dehumanized learning tool or as a sentimentally rehumanized “first patient,” but rather as something inescapably monstrous, to which horror is a legitimate and functional—and professional—response? This talk is part of a project examining the place in medicine of horror—both the emotional response and the text genres defined by efforts to generate that reponse. Medicine and horror share a great deal of common subject matter, and horror, even more than fear, may constitute an unspoken emotional subtext for much patient experience. Yet health care, reasonably, works hard to keep the horrific contained. One of the first ordeals all medical student must overcome tests their ability to approach the cadaver without showing (or even feeling) horror. I suggest that potential harm to students’ emerging professional identity may lie less in unempathic dehumanization of the cadaver, as is often averred, than in a defensive failure to acknowledge anatomy lab as an initiation into the horror—imagined, represented, and felt—that forms a significant subtext of real-world clinical practice.