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DISCOVERY THROUGH DISSECTION CONFRONTING MORTALITY As a society, we fi nd sex, insanity, and death particularly upsetting, so we hide them away from our daily experience. The messy primal fruiting of birth is isolated in a ward; the decay of illness masked with the hospital's carbolic smell of power; and the agitation of the out-of-synch child or the despair of the love-thwarted adult blunted with drugs. And your dead relatives are dressed up, fi lled out, and made up to simulate life (that is, if they are seen at all). Maintaining this illusion of a clean, logical, and immortal life comes at a cost, in my humble opinion, to our deeper cultural sanity. My brother and I washed my father's body when he died. Though diffi cult and done through tears, it was a gift—an essential element of accepting the death of my good friend. Looking inside the leftover casing This depiction of the circulatory vessels was published by Vesalius in 1548. He was attempting to objectify the popular treatment of phlebotomy—blood-letting—by showing where the veins and arteries led. The discovery of capillaries and the closed nature of the blood circulation was still 100 years in the future. of the soul is different. The truth for most of us is that we do not see our own insides, except in a brief and dreadful moment if we happen to look into a wound, as I did when I tried to chop my fi nger off splitting kindling last winter in the dark. Even as a veteran of many dissections, looking at my own tendons was so disconcerting that I crumpled down the wall and sat holding a cloth over it. Not to staunch the blood—strangely, there was little—but because I could not bear looking into myself in that way. So here comes a gift: people who will let you look into them. Please, as you turn these pages, remember that each one of the gentle people here depicted actively gave his or her body to this process. They are donors, and their gift is an intimate gift of personal knowledge—let's use it. One teenager shown these pictures came up with the obvious one word reaction; "Gross!" but then sat down and grilled me on my methods and the implications as he leafed through the photos, so that the one word summary on my years of work as he dropped the subject and stuck his chirping ear buds back in was "Cool!" For the students who participate in these dissections, the initial helpless ickiness of confronting a lifeless but lifelike body soon becomes an awe- inspiring (and strangely respectful, considering what we're doing) exploration of a life. You know this person after spending this intimate time with their remaining form, and this knowledge has echoes in the deepest caverns of your own psyche. Far from being a detached, scientifi c project, participating in these dissections is dynamic, emotional, poetic, and ultimately soul-expanding. Pretending that one can be objective in the midst of such a process is a foolish scientifi c conceit. So you have the choice to thumb quickly beyond the next few pages or sit down for a short audience with the Grim Reaper. If you do, you will learn something new, both about how we are connected inside and how our hands-on modalities work across the body the way they do, but also about our place in the spiral of life. DISSECTION AS A LEARNING TOOL Another gift is the skill of the dissectors who expose the structures for us from the complicated mess that is a real human body—in this case, a new conception of myofascial slings and meridians arrayed around the skeleton, a way of seeing functional connections we call Anatomy Trains.1 36 massage & bodywork january/february 2010