A contemplation on aging and materiality
During my freshman year at St. John’s College, our biology class went to a medical school to examine dissected cadavers after the medical students were done with them. This was a unique privilege, as our professor knew someone and got us special access to these bodies, putting the school’s famous hands-on approach to learning into action. Later in the semester, we also dissected cats and frogs and fertilized chicken eggs in different stages of development. We were looking for clues to life, death, and the processes in between.
As I poked around in the body of an old woman and then an old man lying on the cold laboratory tables, lifting kneecaps to reveal metal and plastic parts, hip joints similarly unwrapped to expose replaced segments, these bodies seemed a lifetime away from me. Totally foreign at first — not just because they were dead — but old. Opening the woman’s abdomen, I saw her worn-out uterus, missing ovaries — on the man, a similar f…
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