Neuropathology

It makes a slick, slimy, wet-but-not-dripping sound as the knife glides through. Slice one. The texture is gelatinous and moldable, but it holds its shape. White and grey; there are patterns in the slice. Like cloud-gazing, you can make-believe that the shapes are mysterious life-forms.

It used to be alive. A day ago, maybe two. More than alive. That piece of tissue, now split indelicately on a slab of marble, felt emotions. It thought up ideas, and imagined shapes in the clouds it saw. It had an identity, and a personality. Now it sits cold; a lump of withered sponge, unable to defend itself from the blade that is slicing it apart.

The blade is wielded by a pathologist, demonstrating to us the gross anatomy of normal brain tissue, and some pathological (diseased) findings. Pathologists (in addition to other things) perform autopsies to determine causes of death. Dead bodies are regularly their domain. Unlike the neurosurgeon, who explores the brain while it is warm, pulsing, and ever dancing with electrical activity, the pathologist handles tissue more like damp tofu.

Evidently, the early anatomists perceived as much awe when they pro-sected cadaver brains. The names they assigned the structures sound like discoveries from an exploratory deep-sea dive: the geniculate nucleus; the hippocampus, which in Greek means sea-horse; the cerebral aqueduct. Shapes in the clouds…