Philip has just met his partner in the anatomy lab.
"He looked at the boy who had accompanied him into the dissecting-room and saw that he was white.

"Make you feel rotten?" Philip asked him.

"I've never seen anyone dead before."

It often happened in the old days that a few members of each class would take one look at the dead bodies, and
be unable to tolerate the sight, and immediately drop out
of medical school. Now Compartive Anatomy is a pre-requisite, and the transition from dead animals to a dead human is relatively easy to make.

some years ago, Jonathan Miller (a producer for BBC) did a TV series for them (picked up by PBS) about the human body and the 'functioning systems'... (resperation, circulation, endocrine... etc.

the final episode was an autopsy. the deceased was a woman in her 80's with pulminary edema.(sypmtom of her cardic failure, partially a result of a childhood bout of rhuematic fever that had damaged her heart valves) she was interviewed before she died for the show.

as Dr Miller made the first big cut, opening the chest cavity, i winced... all i could think of was the pain.. in a few moments, i realise, she wasn't feeling any pain, and the body i was looking at, was not the 'woman' who was speaking on screen a few minutes before..

i 'disconnected' the person(the spirit, the animated self) from the body.. and after that watching the autopsy was facinating.

i have been in NYC's morgue and the morgue in Bellevue hospital (as a Xerox tech, working on machines there) but i have never been in the autopsy rooms, or seen a autopsy(except for the TV one). i don't think i would be put off, or frightened, at least not after the first few minutes.

NYC morgue has a latin welcome-- translated in says:
Welcome here, were death delights to teach the living.

i think its a good motto for a morgue.