The Unseen Body by Jonathan Reisman

Author:Jonathan Reisman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

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All human dissection necessarily begins with the skin too. My cadaver in anatomy lab was an old man lying facedown on a metal gurney, prone like a deer on the forest floor ready for skinning. His skin was cold to the touch, and the bloodless gray of thinly overcast skies. The medical school’s mortician had pumped his body full of a smelly preservative solution that had kept his skin and the rest of his tissues moist and supple, but without rotting. He stayed in that preserved state for the several months it took to dissect him. Lorie had failed to mention a third fate for skin after life—preservation with industrial solvent.

Following instructions in the dissection guide, my fellow students and I started our first cut just below the nape of his neck, and the scalpel ran straight down the middle of his back. We made several horizontal cuts that crossed the initial vertical cut, and then began pulling loosened flaps of skin to both sides. The skin was greasy from the man’s fat, slippery, and not nearly as stretchy as fresh skin.

Once we got the skin pulled out of the way, we ignored it for the remaining four months of anatomy lab. We studied the muscles, nerves, blood vessels, tendons, and bones hidden beneath the skin, but the organ that had caught my interest through tanning was treated as little more than an inert layer of wrapping paper to be torn aside and tossed away on a mission to reach the prize inside. In anatomy lab, it seemed as though skin were the body’s superficial ornamentation, as irrelevant to the practice of medicine as clothing itself.

At the end of each day of dissection, we flipped the skin flaps back onto the muscles and organs beneath to prevent them from drying out—keeping the body moist is an important function of skin in the living too. Still, despite being covered in plastic, a few edges of the skin dried out over months, turning into recognizably strong and stiff rawhide. Bits of muscle, too, dried into stiff jerky, and I understood that our entire bodies have the same two fates after death that Lorie had laid out: drying out or rotting.

It was in histology class the following semester where I learned that skin is much more than a static outer lining. Skin is the body’s largest organ, and it has a complex life of its own—it comprises an active and bustling layer atop the body like topsoil overlying the earth. Sweat glands burrow within it and help cool the body by secreting sweat to moisten skin. Neighboring sebaceous glands condition and lubricate skin by secreting sebum. Skin’s embedded follicles sprout hairs, each equipped with a tiny muscle that stands the hair up on end in response to the frigid chill of winter, a creepy feeling, or mesmerizing vocal harmonies.

And skin is intelligent: as the only organ regularly exposed to the sun, it tans in response to sunlight, darkening with pigment to protect mutation-prone DNA from ionizing solar radiation.

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