Having worked in anatomy, one question I never asked - and never heard asked - was what made somebody ‘good’ at anatomy. Indeed, what does ‘Good at anatomy?’ actually mean?
Most students were engaged in rote learning the names of parts, their relation to other parts, connections, divisions, etc. Our best students were those who could remember the most. Learning anatomy was tantamount to memorising a gazetteer of place names. A London taxi driver doing ‘the knowledge’ probably learns more places and locations and routes between them than does any medical student learning parts of the human body. For good reason, this type of anatomy is called ‘topographical anatomy,’ for it is about learning where things are - and their names. Would one say that a taxi driver is good at geography - or, more specifically, the geography of London? Is there something more to being an anatomist - or a geographer? Perhaps if I were to find out what makes for a good geographer, that might inform what I consider to be a good anatomist?
We must also remember that the parts of the body did not come ready named. We named them, and those names should never be assumed to be set in concrete. The conventions regarding anatomical nomenclature have changed from time to time… and been revised… and reviewed etc.
So for somebody to be good at anatomy, there must be something more than simply being able to remember names. I once had a colleague who learned anatomy in France. At that time - the 1970s or 80s - he had to learn the name of each part in three languages: French, English and Latin. And yet, I am not entirely sure whether he saw himself as an anatomist per se. His real academic interest was in studying the early developmental fate of cells, which he had marked with fluorescent viral markers.
Is there a frame of mind that makes an anatomist? A famous anatomist from the nineteenth century, Sir Ashley Paston Cooper (1768-1841), once commented that he considered a day to have been wasted if he had not dissected something. So perhaps it is the desire to dismantle that marks out the anatomist?
And that, interestingly, returns us to the Humpty Dumpty problem. Cooper’s days felt wasted if a dissection had not been performed. It does not appear to have occurred to him, whether not putting things back together again was not also a waste.
