BJZ Poems and Musings

In the first two years of medical school I worked in the autopsy area of the Pathology department to earn a little spending money. I was called a “diener” – a German word for a person who prepares bodies, assists with autopsies, and removes organs for pathological examination. I worked off-hours – evenings or weekends, usually alone in the old, cold, sterile autopsy room. The bodies of the deceased were on individual metal tables on wheels, and several could be stored in a crowded closet-like room. One Saturday morning I checked the toe tag for the body I would cut open and started to pull the table out of the room. The arm of another body behind me suddenly fell down and struck me in the back. Luckily my terrified scream could not be heard outside the autopsy area, but I hastily departed that room of the dead and slammed the heavy metal door. This was grim work that taught me a lot about anatomy and disease. I would hoist the body onto the autopsy table, slice open the scalp and use a circular saw to cut through the skull and then remove the brain, and similarly open the chest and abdomen and harvest the organs, flush out the bowel, and put the yield in labeled plastic buckets. I wrote this poem after making a surprising discovery in the “trash” bucket as I completed my diener work for the morning.

What Child is This?

for beer money I work weekends
in G-103 as an autopsy diener
alone

we had just finished a lecture
on kidneys
so of course
I was thinking
kidneys kidneys kidneys

I tossed some stray fascia
into the wastebasket
for organs and parts disposal
(gut bucket)

looking at the day’s
collection there seemed
in the collage to be
a kidney brownish and round

so of course
I reached down to pick it up
and look

oh my it was a child
four months tops from conception
I mean not a kidney

a whole thing a he
they had hacked out
(the doctor-scientists)
all the organs and brain

it sprawled over my hand
floppy mouth open
one foot bent wrong
a thumbs down
in the matter of selection

but bury him it Christ’s sake
in the gut bucket
disgusted I relined
a new one
and did a
proper disposal

Brian J. Zink – circa 1982 – Copyright applies