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Skeletons

The Vesalius amphitheater was the venue for my anatomy class at Belgium’s L’Université Catholique de Louvain, Faculté de Médecine, the oldest Catholic university in Europe. The auditorium got its name from Andreas Vesalius, who was the greatest physician and anatomist of the sixteenth century and was rumored to have used illegally exhumed bodies for his specimens. A grave robber. But Vesalius revolutionized anatomical study with his book,On the Fabric of the Human Body, with illustrations of his human cadaver dissections widely believed to have been drawn by students of Titian. On that first day of class, sitting in this arena, it struck me that I was suddenly a full-fledged medical student—so soon after being an American medical school reject. But it wasn’t sudden—I’d been studying in Belgium for three months on my own, knowing little French, in an attempt to pass the entrance exam and not have to take a year of pre-med studies there.

I never truly saw myself in medical school. It wasn’t something I had thought through as an undergraduate. I’d just always told my parents (since childhood) that I wanted to be a doctor. My father always seemed quite pleased, uttering something like, “Good, I’ll have someone to take care of me in my old age.” Another remark that I heard from him with some frequency was, “Are you going to put me in a nursing home when I’m old?”

My mother, on the other hand, kept her own counsel on the subject. She was tight-lipped, worried-looking, not exactly a classic Jewish mother. The sun didn’t rise and fall with my every utterance and action. At least not in my presence.

My father’s sentiments were not lost on me, but in reality I was on this path because I didn’t know what else to do. This I remember clearly—walking across the Brooklyn College quadrangle in spring of my junior year, worried by the specter of going to med school far from home. Why the hell do I want to be a doctor anyway? What I came up with was that I could take this skill anywhere in the world if, one day, I was forced to take it on the lam.

It was during the first week of classes at Louvain that Professor Dhem, our anatomy professor, instructed us to obtain a human skeleton. Luckily, I’d heard of a place to get one. It was late in the afternoon—dark, chilly and rainy—the day I set out for the bag of bones. I wound up in a Brussels residential area of two-family brick houses. I’d never pictured such dwellings in Europe. It was kind of like being in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, except that these abodes were in various states of disrepair. The concrete stairs, for example, bore cracks and holes. I noticed the streets were kind of empty, with hardly anyone in sight except for a few fragile elderly types, the kind who can