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At Erika’s university, the study of cadavers is open to any interested sophomore. Each autumn, roughly 250 students sign up for the initial course in human physiology. Those who survive the lectures and lab sessions can take a second, more intensive course. Many students stop at this point. A few, like Erika, decide to continue with the human dissection course in the spring, when fresh cadavers are brought to the school.

During the week of spring break, faculty members rent a van for the 200-mile round trip to OHSU, where they exchange “used” cadavers from the previous year’s class for “fresh” ones to be dissected by the students in the spring term lab. Experience has proven that a rental van with the rear seats removed is the easiest and most affordable way to move the cadavers. The obvious alternative, rented hearses, would cost as much as the cadavers themselves, which go for $1,500 a piece. This is a steal compared to the value of a body on the open market, which typically runs between $15,000 and $34,000. A body broker with the right connections can earn six figures from a single cadaver.

The new bodies don’t have toe tags. In Oregon, bodies are tracked by identification numbers stamped on metal disks sewn to each cadaver’s right ear with a sturdy piece of twine. Real names are concealed to protect the privacy of the donor and their family. New “lab” names are chosen by the anatomy instructors to help humanize the cadavers for students, and to make it easier to refer to individual bodies. This spring the new arrivals are christened Vincent, Tilly, Sven, Delilah, and Harvey. Each arrives with just a few scant facts: age, height, weight, and COD (cause of death). Their average age is sixty-five, about seven years younger than the typical body donor.

The year of a campus cadaver doesn’t follow the fall-winter-spring academic calendar. For these bodies, the school year begins in springtime, with dissection by reasonably experienced students like Erika. She has already spent two terms studying bodies that were prepared for teaching purposes. She is intimately familiar with the interior body. Now it is her turn to wield a scalpel, to slice intact skin, to expose organs and tissues. Erika is creating the teaching cadavers that next fall’s Human Physiology class will explore and study. It’s this responsibility that causes her hands to tremble when she holds a scalpel.

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In the basement lab, the radio plays “She’s Gone” by Hall & Oates: “...and pretty bodies help dissolve her memory...” Each of the new cadavers rests on a rolling metal gurney, the stainless steel surface of which is formed into a tray with a lip about two inches high. At one end, a drain hole leads to a small white plastic bucket suspended on a hook below the outlet. The heads of the bodies are at the drain ends, supported like the skulls of Chinese emperors or Egyptian pharaohs on wooden pillows. Beneath each table, larger buckets wait on the floor. They will hold all the bits and pieces that will be removed over the course of a year. When tissue is removed, someone has to open the bucket to add the new material to whatever is in there already sloshing in a chemical brew. It is not a job anyone looks forward to. The chemical, formalin, is a primary component of the strong smell in the lab – a smell that soaks into clothes and hair, and stubbornly resists shampoos, soaps, and detergents.

The lab aroma also has a nauseatingly sweet base note. It doesn’t come from putrescine or cadaverine, gases released by the inevitable process of tissue decay. (Formalin can’t reach every cell in the body, so some decay is bound to occur.) Putrescine is the odor of meat gone bad; cadaverine is one of the substances that give urine and semen such distinctive smells. The distinctly sweet odor comes from the lab’s special tissue-wetting solution, a mix of grain alcohol, scented fabric softener and propylene glycol, which is regularly sprayed on the bodies and their canvas coverings to prevent dehydration.

A male student is already at work on Vincent’s open chest cavity. A small square of damp canvas discreetly shields and moisturizes Vincent’s face. Erika’s territory is the lower left leg, from a black line drawn just above the knee, down to the tips of his toes. His skin is dark tan in color; the heel is blue with postmortem lividity (bruising). The skin on the largest toe has turned black.

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