[xoxoxoBruce]

Every medical student has to do it, cut up a cadaver, see how it's put together.

A required rite of passage on the way to a doctor's white coat, gross anatomy offers first-year students a hands-on tour of an actual human body, the chance to cut into leathery skin and sinewy muscle, to see pale, stringy nerves that run through the legs like wires, to manipulate tendons in the arms and watch the corresponding fingers move.

To hold a human heart.

To feel the moist ridges of a brain.

Here's how it goes. No blood and guts, just description.