Contemporary Poetry as a Dissection Tool for the Study of Anatomy in Medical Education

Abstract Anatomy has always been a complex subject to teach and learn. Historically, anatomy has been taught via cadaveric dissection, a modality that has declined in recent years due to a shortage of body donations and a pedagogical shift in using virtual reality and technological tools. Today, the teaching of anatomy in medical schools worldwide incorporates the medical humanities. While theoretical knowledge of anatomy is certainly necessary in the healthcare setting, recentering the focus of healthcare from mechanistic models of the body to its transposed context in literary forms such as poetry offer an alternative way of viewing the body, from a mechanistic model to a holistic one that unites the body’s biology with a patient’s selfhood. Through an analysis of two ekphrastic poems about Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’s famous anatomy lessons by contemporary American poet Linda Bierds, I argue that the body (cadaver) that has been deconstructed through anatomical dissection can be reconstructed in poetry via a “poetic dissection.” As a case study, Bierds’s poems demonstrate how the sensory experience of anatomical dissection can reframe dissection as a poetic tool, enhancing the ways in which anatomy, and by extension medical humanities, are taught in medical schools.