When I was teaching the medical curriculum, the dissection of the head and neck was a task reserved for the entirety of the second year. By contrast, the first year was devoted to the rest of the human frame: beginning with the upper limb, students proceeded to the lower, then through the thorax, abdomen, and finally the pelvis. This sequence reflected, in part, the daunting complexity and minute detail inherent in the anatomy of the head, an area where the density of vital structures requires a more seasoned hand.
It was always a point of interest to me that I never heard a student complain about the necessity of dissecting the face. By the second year, any initial qualms regarding the sanctity of the human form—what one might call the Platonic ideal of the individual—seemed to have dissipated. Even when features were distorted or bloated by the embalming process, they remained unmistakably recognisable as faces, the primary seat of human identity. On one occasion, I encountered a group of four students—a pair working on each side of a female cadaver—who appeared uncharacteristically bemused. When I inquired as to the trouble, they pointed to the "blueness of her eyes."
Retracting the eyelids, I was met with two strikingly blue irises. This was startling; normally, the embalming process—utilising formaldehyde and phenol—renders the cornea opaque and the sclerae discoloured. Yet here, the sclerae were notably clear; if not perfectly white, they were a very light shade of grey, a condition quite unlike the clouded appearance typical of preserved specimens. The students’ confusion was entirely justified; it was as if the "medical gaze" had been met by a stare that refused to yield to the indignities of post-mortem preservation.
I then proceeded to do what the students, for reasons unknown, had hesitated to do: I tested the resistance of the globes. Using a small instrument—the specific tool escapes me now, as it was of little consequence—I gently tapped each eye in turn. The result was the distinct, sharp sound of metal striking something hard. The woman had, in life, been fitted with two ocular prostheses. Given the era of the cadaver, these were perhaps unlikely to be true ‘glass eyes’, which largely predated the mid-20th-century shift toward acrylic (PMMA) polymers, though they often retain the name in common parlance. Regardless of the material, this was no doubt a meticulous cosmetic restoration intended to maintain the appearance of sight.
It is quite possible to interact with an individual possessing a single glass eye without ever suspecting the truth; their behavior remains that of a sighted person, the moving eye masking the stillness of its partner. However, a bilateral prosthesis is impossible to ignore in life, primarily because the subject lacks the visual cues, saccades, and environmental engagements of the sighted. In all my years of practice and teaching, I have never encountered a living person with two glass eyes. To find them here, in the quietude of the dissecting room, was a final, silent revelation of a life lived in darkness but presented to the world in brilliant blue.
