by Christine Montross.

Penguin. 295 pages. $24.95.

BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL
Special to the Journal

Unlike perhaps any other profession in this country, doctoring is almost mythical. Doctors are expected to be healers, emotional guides, soothsayers. To their wisdom and knowledge, we literally trust our lives. The grueling years of medical training and the difficulty of admission to medical school have, for many years, accorded medicine the status and insularity of a caste.

The doors to the profession are slowly being wrenched open, however, with ever-increasing numbers of “nontraditional” students donning white coats after years in other fields; lovers of literature and devotees of science will be delighted that a poet has joined those ranks, and, in a painstakingly beautiful memoir, documented the first years of her medical training.

Christine Montross had earned an MFA in poetry and taught school before arriving, at age 28, for her first year at Brown Medical School, where she is now a resident in psychiatry. In Body of Work, she recounts her surprise at the discovery that there was poetry everywhere in anatomy lab, of all places. In a literal sense, the bones and structures and their Latin names are eerily beautiful, tiny poems in themselves — as when Montross describes “reflecting,” or folding back, the muscles in a cadaver’s back:

“The effect is somewhat like opening a triptych, with the muscles swung wide to reveal their undersides and a new layer of musculature, or sometimes bone, underneath. There is always a moment of expectation upon opening, a strange hope of beauty within all that darkness.”

Using the dissection of a human cadaver over the course of a year as the frame, Montross delves into the history of human dissections, explores the ethical questions inherent in her training and her profession, tells intensely personal stories about her process of discovery and her family, and ruminates on life and death and doctoring.

She and her classmates name their cadaver “Eve.” Montross’ relationship to the woman who donated her body for her training is ever-shifting, sometimes fraught, but ultimately one of reverence and deep respect. The imagery of the dissection is beautiful; the ins and outs of the body’s workings are fascinating, and their descriptions filled with wonder and awe.

Equally gripping, however, is Montross’ frank and clear-eyed recounting of her own changing feelings regarding donation and dissection. “She is on the stainless-steel table of her own choosing,” she writes of Eve. “That simple decision allows me to make her into the type of person I would imagine choosing such a thing: educated, opinionated, concerned with the greater good, unsentimental, rational . . . . It makes it easier to think of her as someone not so different from the way I see myself.”

Body of Work traces the colorful history of medical dissection over the centuries, recounting bands of grave-robbers, papal edicts, and grisly anatomical theaters. Traveling to Italy to visit the intact body of Saint Catherine of Bologna and the creepy crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione, in which the bones of 4,000 Capuchin friars have been fashioned into a macabre sort of tableau, Montross grapples with the deep ambivalence surrounding human bodies. Are they human? Are they holy? Does the body of a criminal deserve any less respect than that of an ordinary person? And what, exactly, does that respect entail: burial, cremation, preservation, or something else entirely?

Just as dissecting the dead is intended as a means to healing the living, interspersed with scenes from the anatomy lab are striking moments from Montross’ clinical training. Some of the book’s loveliest and most wrenching moments are here, in the operating room, where a mentally retarded woman lies on a table, or in the ICU, where the crayoned drawings are tacked next to the bed of a ventilated man. “In this sick and mechanized state, he resembles nothing I have ever loved, even distantly,” writes Montross. And yet, “on his headboard, in a childish, crayon scrawl, is a paper sign that, intentionally or not, is unquestionably for me. In capital letters, it reads: MY DADDY IS GOING TO MAKE IT. HE PRMOSED ME HE WOULD.”

Body of Work is a stunning book, a window into a world that, for many of us, is shrouded in mystery. Ultimately, the stories it tells render both the cadavers and the idealistic young doctors who cut into them in the hopes of becoming healers, complicatedly, heart-wrenchingly, beautifully human.