For some wildly scientific reason, the human nose is particularly sensitive to the smell of formaldehyde, able to pick it up at minuscule concentrations. I think about this after every anatomy lab as the odor clings to me, piercing even the smell of Philadelphia as I bike home. Before our first week working with cadavers at TUSPM, I mentioned to a classmate that I was worried about “smelling like death” after lab. I was quickly corrected. Formaldehyde doesn’t smell like death, it smells exactly like what it’s a part of: embalming fluid. Formaldehyde is simply the odorous marker of an incredible chemical that has the power to hold bodies in a state of pause, denaturing their proteins and rendering them unappealing to the bacteria that typically facilitate nature’s cycle. It does this so that I, a first-year podiatry student, may trace every nerve, expose every muscle, and reflect every flap of skin.

While I know rationally that smelling like formaldehyde is a rite of passage for a health professions student and I know that by smelling like it, I am not some sort of death-angel, I still cried after my first experience in the lab. Sitting on my couch, the pickle-like odor lingering in my nostrils, I felt a mixture of emotions—guilt, pride, deep discomfort, and incredible gratitude. I am now a member of a privileged cohort that has the honor of working with cadavers and discovering the human body first-hand. How do I navigate this role respectfully as I separate a recognizable human form into its puzzle pieces? How do I take care of myself as I do something that, for lack of better phrasing, feels so wrong?

I felt very alone in my processing of these emotions, despite knowing that others were experiencing them with me. And even now, after a whole semester of General Anatomy and half a semester of Lower Extremity, I am still not used to it all. When we take our anatomy lab practicals—students snaking around the structures pinned and disarticulated on the dissection tables, typing one-fingered into the iPad exam software—I find myself dissociating. What a bizarre practice we have created: breaking the body down layer by layer, so that we may learn to build it up again.

Before TUSPM installed its new ventilation system in the basement cadaver lab, the first semester general anatomy course was truly a schoolwide affair. The smell not only permeated the basement, but traveled up the elevators, breaching the lobby and even gracing the classrooms on the 2nd and 3rd floors. Now, luckily, any escaping smell is contained to our soon-to-be disposed of scrubs and anatomy shoes, our hair, and our hands. We go home to perform a ritualistic ridding—showering with clarifying shampoo, laundering with cold water and vinegar, and handwashing scrubs in the tub so as not to use the apartment complex’s shared washing machine.

Over time, though, the smell stops coming out of our scrubs. It weaves into the fabric, permanently marking us. Do not wear your anatomy scrubs to the clinic, we’re warned, no matter how many times you wash them, we’ll know, even if you can’t smell it. Desensitization is another wildly scientific process, I suppose. But working in the cadaver lab brings not only desensitization to smell, but desensitization to human bodies, as well. There is no salient conclusion to this, just the realization that becoming a doctor is fundamentally changing the way I see all bodies, especially my own. That’s a hard thing to do when you’ve lived with one vision of your body for so long.

At night, I lie in bed, seeing inside myself—the haphazardness of my small intestine; the precision of my intraocular muscles; the minuscule power of my auditory ossicles. I play out the day’s work in my head: today, I met the posterior thigh, reflecting the skin like a book and reading the origins and insertions of its powerful flexor muscles like words. I think of the donor whose leg we studied. I thank them for their gift. To their family, I look forward to when the remains of their loved one are returned to them. I hope they know how thankful I am. Eventually, I drift off, a hint of formaldehyde in my jobs.