The Course of Their Lives

Mark Johnson:

The noisy, first-day-of-school chatter subsides. A hush falls over 200 students in a lecture hall at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Already, their thoughts are drifting up a flight of stairs to the sprawling dissection lab, where in two days they will meet and become intimate with something many have scarcely encountered: Death.

Khalid Sharif-Sidi, a 24-year-old from Galesburg, Ill., who has never seen a lifeless human body beyond a few seconds at a funeral, is nervous. He wonders if it will look real or fake, if the person will have tattoos or nail polish or piercings. He wants the body he dissects to look anything but real.

Andrew Kleist, a cardiologist's son from Pittsburgh, who shadowed his father often, and last May watched him unblock a heart attack patient's artery at 2 in the morning, feels excited but uncomfortable. The 23-year-old has been thinking about the body upstairs and what he must do to it — not just a body, a person.

Hillary McLaren, a 23-year-old from Neenah who hopes to become the fourth generation in her family to practice medicine, has been steeling herself for the sight of the cadaver. Her mantra: "Don't be that girl who passes out on the first day of anatomy."

Today they begin the defining course of their medical education.