Appendix 1.
Original Essays A and B
Essay A: “Experience with Cadaver”
I had known on that day, I would experience something I had never experienced before.
I remembered the professor standing there to hold the ceremony said, “Every Cadaver was once with memories, hope and happiness.” When I heard that, I actually had tears in my eyes. I felt they once were so alive, why they now ended up lying here? In fact, not only them, what about all those getting sick and finally died? I don’t understand why people died, I can’t understand how come the vive ends up a hollow death. C’est la vie?
But it is not a question to work out the solution now. Although I would like to be a philosopher too, death is not a matter that could be commented fair or not and could be concluded in a second. If they lied there, and that’s the truth could never be changed unless I become a physicists and invented a time machine to dealt with the problem of 4 dimension, I am going to make the life of them becomes more meaningful. You could challenge that perhaps the cadaver won’t think being dissected will make their life more meaningful. Yes, being dissected will make their life more meaning or not, I really don’t know. The point is after we dissected them, we could learn something and could use them to save more life in the future. That’s really what mattered.
They body was lying there, on the steel table, with eyes closing and breath ceased. As he was still in the bag, I could not possibly imagined what he was look like. I could only felt very strange. There lied a real body with human size, it’s big. Everything I had landed my hands in it was ‘small’, like holding pencil, making small figures in my ‘design and technology lesson’, dissecting ‘frogs’, doing experiment with test tubes. My hands had never been working with something as big as human size. And the smell of formaldehyde. I felt really strange.
When I really opened the bad, the feeling is even more strange. Now I can see a person. He still looked like a human. But he was not alive. Not having processed my feeling and deepened my feeling, the professor asked us to start our dissection. So we followed the instructions, so we dissected, and so we finished the dissection. I waited until I finished dissection to proceed my feeling. I don’t really know how to proceed the feeling. However, one thing is clear, I must learn the most from the cadaver, so that I can make everything more meaningful.
I now understand my life ahead will not be an easy one. One day, the person lying there will be a human, I mean on the operation table. You will be responsible for their lives. Lectures made me felt my only mission was to study, while the cadaver made me realized my real job is to deal with real people. And I am not turning more people to cadavers.
I would like to thank all cadavers.
Thank you cadavers.
You are life-savers.
Life has no formula,
Wind came and take whoever it wants without mercy.
We are future doctors,
But I know we are powerless doctors.
We cannot stop the wind,
Even though people think we are rainbows and sunshine.
Soon we will know how powerless we are,
when we really have a hard on collision with the wind.
Yes, it’s true that we are powerless,
But we are not that powerless.
At least, we can delay the wind, with the dam of knowledge.
Dam is not a thing we can build alone.
With your bones,
The dam will be stronger than ever.
Thank you cadaver,
Yes, we will be stronger.
I respect all the cadavers, for they allow us to learn from them. Therefore, I hope all classmates do the same thing as me. When I hear people joking over the cadaver, I feel a little bit angry.
Essay B: “See you next semester, Mr. Cadaver”
Before walking into the dissection lab, I was excited. Dissection of a real human! I have dissected rats and frogs in my secondary school, and it was an interesting experience to look at the delicate organs and tissues in an animal. I could not wait to look at the inside of a human body.
In the dissection lab, the cadavers were all put inside grey plastic bags, zipped up and placed neatly on each dissection table. As we unzipped the bag, I started to smell formalin, the typical smell that many have described as the smell they would remember for life. At the end of the dissection table, I saw the face of my silent mentor.
Before that moment, I was excited, but the next moment I felt confused.
A human body was right in front of me. The body of a person who had been living in the same world as mine, and we were going to cut through his skin, open his chest wall and look at his internal organs. I have never really thought of how it was going to be dissecting a real human body.
I started to panic. In spite of the blue lines drawn on the body, indicating where to cut through the skin, I was confused. A human is totally different from a rat. How should I start? I did not even know how to deal with the instruments - how do I attach the blade onto the handle of the scalpel?
I tried to calm myself down. I looked at my mentor again.
My mentor was a 61-year-old male. He was thin and skinny, lying on the table peacefully and quietly as if he was assuring me that he had confidence in me.
There were wounds on his hand and his chest wall. In particular, there was a hole above his clavicles - was it a gun shot that caused his death?
With the help of others, we successfully put the blade onto the scalpel. We soon began removing our mentor’s skin, separating the fascia, removing the muscles and fat, and exposing the chest wall.
The muscles were thinner than what I have imagined. Perhaps it was because my mentor was thin. I was amazed by how such small pieces of muscles could work together and generate forces for our daily life activities - from walking to lying down, from lifting a load to simply moving our limbs.
The next thing we had to do was to cut the bones and open the chest wall. It was the first time for me to use a saw, and my task was to cut human bones! The idea itself frightened me, and I was shivering while sawing the bones. I was shocked by how delicate the ribs were. Using the bone cutting shears, “clip”, and the ribs were cut within seconds. Yet with the collective strength of twelve pairs of ribs, our rib cage is a rigid structure that can well protect the vital organs in our thoracic cavity.
We took turns in our group, and soon the lungs were exposed. Our mentor’s right lung was collapsed, which was consistent with the hole on his skin discovered earlier. Together with the peeled off skin on his arms and hands, was it possible that our mentor died of traumatic lung puncture? Perhaps not, but we would never know.
Overall, it was an experience in which no words could describe my feelings. I entered an unfamiliar room, used new instruments, and completed an uncommon task. I have never dissected a cadaver, never touched the skin, never felt the texture of the internal organs. It was the first time I have ever witnessed the complexity of the human body - the muscles, the blood vessels, the nerves, and the sophisticated organization.
I was confused and lost, but the feeling was gone after the dissection session. As I walked out of the dissection lab, other than the smell of formalin, I have brought home a challenging and unforgettable experience which I will remember for the rest of my life.
Thank you, and see you next semester, Mr. Cadaver my silent mentor.