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,…