It beats

[shteen]

Last week we opened up the chest wall and dissected out the lungs. The left lung, the only one that was still intact in our body, both fit well with my mental model of it, and yet was new and unfamiliar. The texture and weight were unexpected. It is incredible to hold it and imagine that it is responsible for such important functions. Today we dissected the heart. This dissection was another series of surreal moments, like when I cut ribs to open up the chest cavity last week and peeked inside at the undisturbed chest contents, or when we cut the spinal cord and peeled back its layers at the beginning of the quarter. No matter what we do in the future through our careers, we won't be playing with peoples' organs and crudely breaking bones like this, so I'll say it again: gross anatomy is so incredibly cool.

The most general thing that I can really appreciate from lab is witnessing that parts of a human body can be infinitely variable, and yet each of the versions perform the same simple, life-dependent functions. And as always, we are reminded that all the parts on the dissection table, before we disassembled them, once created life in a person.