In “Seeds of Life,” I reflected on the first time I encountered death—not as a moment of mourning, but as an educational threshold. In the anatomy lab, my donor’s body became a site of learning: layers to be dissected away, structures to be identified, systems to be mastered. Standing before the body, I dreaded the day we would come face-to-face with our donor and dissect his facial structures. Yet when that day arrived, the emotions I anticipated were absent. Without my noticing, a transition had occurred: this encounter with death was no longer about loss, but about participation in an educational ritual. Though this shift felt necessary and even expected, it left behind a quiet unease. In learning to see the body clearly, I wondered if I was learning to stop seeing.
Anna Dovre’s essay “Body of Work” (Fall 2023 Intima) in Where It Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Frontlines of Medicine captures this tension with striking clarity. Dovre, a family medicine resident in Saint Paul, Minnesota, reflects on the role of anatomy in medical education and how it reshapes the way we relate to human bodies, including our own. Her piece resonates deeply with my experience of fragmenting the body in the name of understanding it. Both works exist in the space between reverence and removal, between gratitude for the donor and abstraction of the body into material for study.
What draws me most to “Body of Work” is Dovre’s unflinching self-reflection on clinical detachment. She writes, “And then I wonder at myself: the way my nausea has ebbed, my body looser, at ease. If anything, the scene on the table has become more gruesome, but perhaps that has rendered her less real, less human to me.” In naming this shift, Dovre observes it with honesty rather than shame. Her reflection illuminates how emotional distancing can arise not from indifference, but from immersion—how repeated exposure transforms discomfort into familiarity.
Together, these pieces ask a shared question: How do we hold onto humanity while learning to dissect it?
In bringing these works into dialogue with each other, I am reminded of the importance of self-reflection and collectivity in times of unease. Familiarity can engender distance, but clinical training does not have to come at the expense of meaning. Through noticing and highlighting this shift, the stories we tell through art can ensure that what remains is not only knowledge, but also gratitude, humility, and care.
Elli Lee
Elli Youngeun Lee is a painter and third-year medical student at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She graduated from Brown University with a degree in visual arts in 2022. Lee gleans inspiration from her daily life and on her clinical rotations, hoping to put onto canvas the fleeting but poignant moments of the mundane. Learn more at elli-lee.