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Photo by Dee Puett |
Open the Pericardium widely from in front. Study its
interior (Middle Mediastinum) and note the reflections of its serous layer onto
the great vessels. Take a blunt-pointed pair of scissors and split the
Pericardium up to each of the great blood vessels and trim it away from around
each of them. Be especially careful not to injure the Inferior Vena Cava
(postcava) when freeing it. It is safer to leave intact that portion of the
Pericardium which is attached to the left border of its opening in the diaphragm,
along with the portion that is attached to the upper surface of the diaphragm.
Otherwise, remove all of the Pericardium. Do not remove the heart and do not
cut it open. It must be kept intact and in its place. Use another specimen for
comparison and for the study of the interior of the heart.
--from an antique manual on dissection
Lena came in with a heart in her hand.
It was a humid 95. I
and four or five friends, all of us poor college students, were pooling our
resources to come up with a decent meal.
Lena and Nate had gone to the creek and gigged bullfrogs while I stayed
behind to clean up the kitchen; it was my policy in those days to wash dishes
at least once a month.
Lena had never eaten frog before, and she was struck with
wonder at the whole process. She came in
from the patio where she and Nate were skinning the frogs. “Look at this,” she said. The frog heart in her hand beat, heaving
itself against the air. She poked it
with her finger; it kept beating.
“So?” I said irritably, scrubbing at a crusted skillet.
“It’s still beating.
I didn’t know they did that.”
“Of course they do.
Didn’t you take high school biology?”
I thought back to my first frog dissection--the stink of formaldehyde,
like nausea and cold and lilacs together; the delicate work of chipping away
the skull to get the brain out intact, its thick optic nerves anchoring it to
the eyes, which were larger than the brain itself. The eyes, when severed, would bounce like
rubber balls. In the stomach I found an
entire beetle, thick and shining and black and over an inch long. The liver felt like cold velvet.
Of course, the highlight of the dissection was the shock:
The teacher touched an electric probe to the thigh muscle, and the leg
spasmed. He made a circuit of the limbs:
all of them moved to the electric touch.
The frog must have been dead for weeks, but when the probe spoke, the
muscles still answered.
I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress
with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a
stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty
yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had
disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the
next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not
splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never
beheld anything so utterly destroyed.
A man of great research in natural philosophy was with us,
and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory
which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at
once new and astonishing to me.
--from Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Lena went back outside, annoyed with my failure to
wonder. I went back to my dishes. A moment later I heard the back door open
again. I turned and saw my friends, and
one of them was holding something wet and red and staring that leaped up and
had to be held back. I leaped too, and Lena
was happy with my humbling.
It was a bullfrog, of course, big as a football, still
scrambling to escape even though it had been gigged and clubbed and skinned and
gutted. Its heart lay on the counter
beating. Its bloody striated muscles
pushed against the hands holding it.
The legs tried to jump out of the frying pan. We served them on a bed of rice.
This story originally appeared in Food Chain.