History of a Repugnant Handicraft

Come Meet Babysim!

Goethe, in his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Journey­man Years, de­picts Wilhelm’s en­counter with a cadaver readied for dissection—a scene likely imbued with details from Goethe’s own experience as a gentleman-student of the time. Wilhelm discovers the specimen before him is the body of a young woman who has drowned herself in despair over an unhappy love affair. Lifting the sheet that covers the body, the student spies “the loveliest female arm that had ever been wound around the neck of a young man,” and, as the vision overwhelms him, “his reluctance to mutilate this magnificent product of nature any further struggled with the demands which any man striving for knowledge must place on himself, and which everyone else in the room was busy satisfying.”

The narrator’s (and, one surmises, Goethe’s) qualms about using human bodies for medical education, as well as the often unsavory methods of the time for acquiring those bodies, are addressed by a visitor who suggests an alternative to anatomical destruction: the use of fabricated models. The visitor takes Wilhelm to a studio lined wall-to-wall with wax figures that have “the fresh, colorful appearance of newly prepared specimens.” Wilhelm is enthusiastic about the sculptor’s vision of a sanitized future for medical training, where models will replace the practice of carving up dead bodies for medical study, a practice he labels “a repugnant handicraft” that “especially among naturally moral, high-minded people… always has something cannibalistic about it.”

Perhaps it was a deep-seated fear of cannibalism driving the sixth annual International Meeting on Medical Simulation, held at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Ma­rina in January of 2006. With its iso­lated torsos and heads, bodiless ap­pendages, simulated arms and legs hanging in booths with entreating banners like Come Meet Babysim!, the exhibition hall I walked into felt like a triumphant pageant or a Barbie butcher shop.

“How exciting is it to be at the dawning of an emerging field?” Dr. Daniel Raemer, president of the So­ciety for Simulation in Healthcare, asked the attendees. “So many new colleagues,” he continued with enthusiasm, “nascent ideas, ground­breaking technologies appear be­fore us at a rate that exceeds our ability to fully embrace them.” This mood of excitement, of pioneers assembled at the edge of uncharted territory, was reflected plainly in the faces of the hundreds of eager medical professionals as they milled jovially about the chandeliered ex­hibition hall.

I stood surrounded by the cutting edge in fabricated human bodies, surveying a range of goods that seemed both ahead of its time and quaintly, earnestly representational—the expressions of both discomfort and entreaty on the man­nequins’ faces, the personality al­luded to in a blond pediatric model, “Dylan,” by his low-rise basketball...