Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/68165
us to take a body apart and examine the ever-smaller component parts of the machine to see how they assemble and work together—inductive, deductive, but most of all reductive reasoning applied to the body. Of course, the truth is that the body is not assembled like a machine, but grown like a plant from a single seed spinning a single manifold membrane. This image of the body as machine is a limited one and blinds us to the synergetic aspects of whole-system functioning. The body is also like a poem, an idea, a fractal, a hologram, or an ecosystem, housing the strange properties of curiosity, suffering, redemption, and the understandable yet unfathomable phenomenon of love. Texts such as Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the TV show) are based on such dissections, which have contributed so much to our knowledge of how the body works. The work of Frank Netter, Carmine Clemente, Andrew Biel's Trail Guide to the Body, and other common texts and atlases are a clarification and an averaging of hundreds of such dissections. We massage therapists can be forgiven for thinking that the books show the way it is and nothing further will be discovered. We hope these pages dispel that notion: there is much that can still be learned. NEW PERSPECTIVES Nevertheless, anatomy is understood to be known—very few new muscles, bones, or organs are going to be discovered by further dissection at this point. The exciting edge of medicine is gathered instead at the eye of the microscope, looking into the biochemistry of the cell, where physiological processes and the development of drugs to manage them occupies most of the time and money in medical research.3 Thus, in modern medical schools, less and less time in a medical education is devoted to gross anatomy and dissection. More and more training is done via computer simulation, and the actual process of dissection is regarded as too time consuming when there is so much relevant biochemistry to be absorbed. One result of this trend is that cadavers have become available to the alternative and complementary therapists, who are using them—as we do here—to test their new theories on how the body works. Cadaver dissection was a near impossibility when I entered this field 35 years ago. Now this opportunity is available to you, and recently we even have limited access to fresh-tissue cadavers that offer a closer approximation to the living flesh we feel every day. Today, inspired by the success of our new bodywork methods, it is we who need to go and see for ourselves (the word autopsy means see for yourself ) in our own terms, just how the body is constructed and how it might be responding to our methods. Thus, the value of these dissections is not in discovering new muscles or nerves, but to uncover new perspectives on what everyone else has looked at before. The work of Gil Hedley,4 David Kent,5 and many others has done much to bridge the gap between our frail sensibilities and the gritty, but insightful reality offered by the human form of a dead body. These pictures were created under the gentle but fiercely focused tutelage of Todd Garcia, whose Laboratories of Anatomical Enlightenment have provided a staging ground for the several week-long dissection courses whose results are summarized here. Garcia and Hedley and the others deserve our thanks for their courage, dedication, and skill in bringing forward this opportunity to test our crackpot theories and splenius capitis and cervicis ribs and intercostals gluteus maximus gluteus medius tensor fasciae latae anterior lateral compartment ligament of the fibula head peroneus brevis peroneus longus sternocleidomastoid scalenes external and internal oblique iliotibial tract The Lateral Line runs from the ankle to the ear, and includes the ribs within its grasp. connect with your colleagues on massageprofessionals.com 41