Six months ago, I was working out at a local Pilates studio when I was stopped mid-stretch to have a conversation with the instructor.
At the time, I was researching an article about fascia, a network of connective tissue that runs throughout the body and is key to athletic performance. And it occurred to me that my teacher, Kim Villanueva, a veteran of the New York Pilates world, might be someone like this. He was interested in hearing what I learned. So while I was doing leg circles on the reformer machine, we started chatting about fascia.
Her face lit up. She was so interested in fascia, she told me, that she spent a week studying it up close at a cadaver dissection workshop in Colorado Springs.
Cue the proverbial record scratch.
For the rest of the session, my mind wasn’t very in tune with my body. I was back flipping something Villanueva shared with me. What part of her Pilates training gave her access to a cadaver lab? Where did the bodies she dissected come from? And how did she apply what she learned?
I’ve previously reported on how training and knowledge for fitness professionals can vary, but this is a level of continuing education that was never thought possible for people outside the medical field. did.
At the end of the session, Villanueva shared some details about the course she took and enthusiastically talked about how mind-expanding the experience was. (She studied with Gil Hedley, a leader in non-medical anatomy education.) Many of her Pilates colleagues also attended human anatomy workshops.
And hidden from most consumers, just about anyone with an interest in learning about the body and a few thousand dollars to spare can dissect a cadaver, including fitness experts, massage therapists, and acupuncturists. A months-long exploration into a thriving subculture began. We find that this is often donated by people who have been helped in their lives by fitness or bodywork professionals and want to pay for that help into the future. My article about these courses was published in the science section of the New York Times last month.
As we conducted further research, we interviewed organizers of several popular anatomy courses and more than a dozen alumni of these programs. They all said the same thing. “The value of dissecting the human body cannot be fully understood until you actually do it.”
My editor and I agreed that to truly understand my subject, I needed to see what they were talking about.
I researched upcoming anatomy courses and made arrangements to attend the earliest one, held last October at a lab called Experience Anatomy in Charlotte, North Carolina.
As a health reporter, I was excited to see the inner workings of the body. But as someone who has a very low tolerance for gore in other contexts, I was also feeling uneasy.
When I arrived at the lab, I changed into scrubs along with the other five students who were registered. The group didn’t seem to mind the fact that I was taking notes along with the cadaver they were dissecting (I didn’t pick up the scalpel myself). Whatever we are about to go through, we will go through it together.
The body was found to be that of a 75-year-old woman who had died just two weeks earlier. The autopsy has begun.
For the next eight hours, I stood shoulder to shoulder with the students around the dissection table. My role as a reporter, a professional observer, served as a kind of protective plexiglass that helped me compartmentalize what I was witnessing.
But I’m a human being, and so is the body on the table. When I interviewed anatomy educator Mr. Hedley a week ago, he said, “The body is not a person.” Still, I found myself wondering about the donor’s life, the people she loved, and the meaning of her foot tattoo. I also paid attention to the reactions of the students around me and my own reactions.
As I left the lab, I felt a mixture of sadness and exhaustion. As I will write about later in the article, I didn’t see any tourists at the airport that night. What I saw was a walking corpse. I knew I had a fascinating story to tell, but at what emotional cost?
But over the next few days, as I worked through my near death experience, I began to understand what many of the fitness instructors I interviewed had told me about their experiences. A sense of awe and appreciation for the bodies they brought to work.
For me, spending time with corpses made me deeply appreciate being alive. And by talking to sources, I realized I wasn’t alone.
This feeling eventually brought me back to the Pilates studio, where I felt newly energized to explore my body’s ability to bend, stretch, and strengthen.
And of course, to research ideas for my next article.
