Breasts

From womb to tomb, men and women alike are fascinated with breasts.

They come in all shapes, sizes, colors, symmetries. The size and relation of the areola to nipple with regards to the rest of the breast can also vary, with some being as tiny as dimes and others being the size of an Eisenhower silver dollar.

Breasts to the extremely young are a means of sustenance, a way of obtaining nutrients before they are able to masticate solid food. This is not something unique to humans, as it occurs across all mammalian species everywhere in the world. To humans, and maybe some species of primates, breasts are also regarded as an aesthetically pleasing object that embodies sex. Ancient civilizations have left behind artifacts in the form of cave drawings, effigies, and statuary or idolatry depicting powerful women with emphasized breasts. Renaissance artists like Boticelli and Da Vinci had made masterpieces that focused on the female form, with their flowing hair and bare breasts. Venus de Milo was born of the sea, with her long flowing locks barely covering her ample, round breasts and her mons pubis. The new age of media following the industrial revolution gave way to what is now commonly known as pornography, but in the early days of printed nudes, most of what was revealed and captured on film was limited to the bare breast.

We are a species that is fascinated with breasts, and that's what made it very difficult for me to cut into Ruth's breast tissue as we prepared to take her body into deeper stages of dissection.

Before Cynthia, Susan and I began to cut open her breasts, we consulted with Kevin just to make sure that what we were about to do would be to his liking. Andrea and Tammy were going to stay focused on cleaning up Ruth's right leg, uncovering the musculature that lay underneath her padding of fat. The task of what to do with Ruth's breasts was left to us.

I had been working on Ruth's left side, and Cynthia and Susan on the right. Cynthia did a lot of work cleaning up underlying fascia on the right, with Susan doing a wonderful job of helping both sides with the endless amounts of scraping and scooping of adipose. It sounds crass, but that's what it is. Cynthia's class had dissected her face, and she wanted to finish what had been started but there was so much to do with the chest area that she stopped working on the face to help get us started. Call it scalpel shyness, if anything. Cynthia didn't have it.

It had been decided that since her right breast was smaller than the left, that we would cut around the areola and remove the skin surrounding the rest of her breast, leaving it intact. The left one was more substantial so what we would do is a mid saggital cut through the areola and nipple, down to the muscle. We would remove half of the breast and leave the other half intact, so that one could view it and see how breast tissue differs from the underlying muscle.

I did the initial cut through Ruth's areola and nipple. I apologized to Ruth, even though I know she felt no pain. I felt odd doing this to a woman's breast, even if she was dead and had donated her body to science so that students like me could learn to heal by dismantling the dead. I kept right on going, and by this time I was on full autopilot mode. I removed the skin from the breast to the midline, then braced myself to make the first cut into her breast tissue to remove the one half. Her breast tissue looked just like the rest of her adipose tissue, but more fibrous. I quickly changed thoughts, as I don't want to associate my own breasts with cold, greasy, yellow adipose.

With full confidence, I pushed my scalpel through the mound of exposed breast tissue. I gasped. Nothing could have prepared me for the feeling of the blade as it pushed through. It's very hard to describe, but the best analogy I can come up with is that it feels like taking an exacto knife and cutting through packing peanuts surrounded by layer upon layer of bubble wrap. I slid my scalpel halfway down her breast tissue and then looked at Susan, who was patiently scraping fat and helping pretty up exposed areas. She looked at me and I told her, "Susan, you HAVE to feel this."

I traded roles with Susan and let her finish the removal of the medial half of Ruth's deeply exposed breast. For the next 30 minutes, I scraped up fat, cleaned up exposed structures, and talked with Susan and Cynthia about how we all own a Miata. Anything to ignore the weird nagging thought in my head about cutting up a stranger's breast.

Later on Susan and I switched spots again, and I started cleaning up further below the left breast and making plans for what I wanted us to do for Ruth next week. Jerry's group was further along with their cadaver, since he was a leaner guy, and they were already at the point where a good amount of his musculature was exposed. I wanted to, with Kevin's permission of course, start aggressively cleaning up the fat on the frontal side of her body, and get to where we were also looking at muscle.

With this aggressive attitude in mind, I started exposing her left pectoralis major muscle. At first I wasn't sure that I'd gone so deep that I'd hit muscle, but as I kept scraping away fat I started seeing reddish fibers follow my scalpel. Sure enough I'd hit muscle. I started snipping away at the fibers that were stubbornly holding her adipose to the muscle, but finally had given up on the tediousness of the job. With a self taught culinary background in mind, I took one of the dull dissecting knives and started rapidly slicing away at the connective fibers. There was a voice in my head that started mocking me, in a singsong voice, "Jen is a butcher, Jen is a butcher." I had to shut off that internal voice and keep on going.

Minutes later, I'd exposed her entire left pectoralis major muscle, with the very top portion of her rectus abdominus muscle peeking out under the 1/4 inch of exposed rectus sheath. I called Kevin over to look and he simply said, "Good work." I breathed a sigh of relief. His opinion of my work in this class means so much to me for some reason, and I want to make sure that I'm not only doing his teaching justice, but that I'm also not wasting the time of my group mates, nor disrespecting the generosity and deep altrusim of Ruth.

I stood back and looked at my work. Her muscle was exposed beautifully. Ruth had large muscles underneath all those layers of adipose, and we were beginning to reveal them to the world. Soon afterwards we covered her with a linen sheet, wet her down with embalming fluid, said our thanks, and walked out of the lab one by one.

Even in death, her breasts did not fail to amaze us. We marveled over them, cupped them in our hands, and treated them as lovingly as we could given the tasks we set out to do. Her breasts taught us new things about our own, things we could not possibly have learned without Ruth.

Before I wrote this, I held my own breasts in the shower and thought about hers. Mine feel different; mine are warm, alive, still soft and pleasing to the touch. But underneath it all, my breasts are like Ruth's. I know what the breast is composed of now, in a way that most people will never understand. I have done things to a woman's breast that most people will never be able to replicate. The understanding I have gained from this experience will last my entire lifetime, but as of this moment I'm still trying to get over the weird feeling that I have done something unspeakable; that I'm guilty of debauchery.

Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.