12
Cambridge Blues (1949)
Unlike most undergraduates – never ‘students’, one of countless minor anachronisms – I knew Cambridge well when I first went up to King’s. I knew the coffee shops and bookshops, I had punted on the Cam, I knew several of the colleges well, especially Trinity, I had been to the tea dances at the Dorothy, the Arts Cinema and the film society, where I had seen all the pre-war classics such as The Seashell and the Clergyman, and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou and L’Âge d’Or.
This had advantages and drawbacks. There was never any chance that I would be ‘smitten’ by the visual impact of the colleges, the Gothic presence of King’s chapel, the beauty of the Backs. I went on having my hair cut at the same barbers, I bought my shoes at the same shoe shops. Had I seen Cambridge for the first time in 1949, I might have taken more from it. In a sense I was ready to leave as soon as I arrived, not the best arrangement.
On the other hand, I could concentrate on the important aspects of Cambridge – the medical and science faculties – and ignore anything connected with ‘heritage’ Cambridge, which has mesmerised generations of parents, who have sacrificed so much energy and ambition into getting their children between those sacred Gothic walls. This has long been one of the most wasteful forms of English snobbery. I firmly believe that Oxford and Cambridge should be graduate universities only, at one stroke killing off this absurd status race, and at the same time benefiting all other universities.
In reality there are two Cambridges, the faculties on the one hand – history, physics, archaeology and so on – where research, lectures and laboratory work take place, and the colleges, which are residential clubs that provide poor food, a small amount of often poor teaching and the bulk of the myths about the Cambridge lifestyle. I was very happy with the first, and bored stiff by the latter.
I spent my two years studying anatomy, physiology and pathology. The tuition I received was superb, the lectures lucid and intelligent, and the anatomy demonstrators who regularly tested us were all qualified physicians specialising in surgery. Anatomy involved the extended dissection of the five parts into which the human body was divided. Physiology and pathology largely consisted of examining slides through the microscope, but anatomy was a process entirely initiated by the student, and demanded hours of patient application. The dissecting room was the gravitational centre of all medical study. If nothing else was going on we would go to the DR, put on our white coats, take our particular body part – the leg, arm or head-and-neck we were dissecting, and start work alongside our Cunningham dissection manuals (never Gray’s), whose pages would soon be stained with human fat.
Before our first visit to the DR we were welcomed by Professor Harris, the head of the anatomy school. He was an inspirational lecturer, the child of a modest Welsh family too poor to send their children to university. Harris and his brother were both determined to become doctors, so the younger brother worked for six years to support the older and pay his medical school fees until he qualified. He in turn supported his younger brother for a further six years until both had gained their degrees. In his wide-ranging lectures Harris made clear his belief in the noble calling of medicine, with anatomy at its heart, and I never for a moment doubted him.
At the end of his opening lecture Harris warned that a small number of us would be unable to cope with the sight of the cadavers waiting for dissection on the glass-topped tables. Walking into that strange, low-ceilinged chamber, halfway between a nightclub and an abattoir, was an unnerving experience. The cadavers, greenish-yellow with formaldehyde, lay naked on their backs, their skins covered with scars and contusions, and seemed barely human, as if they had just been taken down from a Grünewald Crucifixion. Several students in my group dropped out, unable to cope with the sight of their first dead bodies, but in many ways the experience of dissection was just as overwhelming for me.
Nearly sixty years later, I still think that my two years of anatomy were among the most important of my life, and helped to frame a large part of my imagination. Both before and during the war in Shanghai I had seen a great many corpses, some at very close quarters, and like everyone else I had neutralised my emotional response by telling myself: ‘This is grim, but sadly part of life.’ I assume that police, firemen, paramedics, doctors and nurses react in the same way. But they, at least, are absolved from any sense of guilt or responsibility. Even as a child in Shanghai I knew that something was wrong. Most of the corpses I saw, even (indirectly) the famine and disease victims, had been killed by someone else, and childishly I felt that I was partly responsible.
Now, in 1949, only a few years later, I was dissecting dead human beings, paring back the layers of skin and fat to reach the muscles below, then separating these to reveal the nerves and blood vessels. In a way I was conducting my own autopsy on all those dead Chinese I had seen lying by the roadside as I set off for school. I was carrying out a kind of emotional and even moral investigation into my own past while discovering the vast and mysterious world of the human body.
Each term we would begin work on a new cadaver, five teams of two students dissecting a body part. A team would separate its part from the cadaver, and continue the term’s dissection on its own. When the DR was closed we would leave our parts in one of the large wooden cabinets – one cabinet filled with heads, another with legs, and so on. Looking at the heaped faces with their exposed teeth, it was difficult not to think of the newsreels of Belsen and Dachau that were still being shown in cinemas when fresh accounts of Nazi atrocities came to light.
In 1949 most of the cadavers in the DR were those of doctors who had willed their bodies for dissection to the next generation of medical students. This selfless act was a remarkable tribute to the spirit of these dead doctors, who knew that they would be reduced at the end of the term to a clutch of bones and gristle tagged for the incinerator. Once, searching for the senior laboratory assistant, I strayed into the preparation room beyond the DR on the last day of term, and found a large table set with a dozen metal platters, each bearing its tagged remains of the doctors who had bequeathed their bodies, a mysterious banquet in which I had taken part. I felt, and still feel, that in a sense they had transcended death, if only briefly, living on as the last breath of their identities emerged between the fingers of the students dissecting them.
Although they were identified only by number, each of the cadavers seemed to have a distinct personality – the girth and general physique, the profile bones of the face coming through the skin and reasserting themselves, the scars and blemishes, odd anomalies such as extra nipples and toes, residues of operations, tattoos, inexplicable blemishes, the story of a lifetime written into the skin, especially of the hands and face. Dissecting the face, revealing the layers of muscles and nerves that generated expressions and emotions, was a way of entering the private lives of these dead physicians and almost of bringing them back to life.