First Cut A Season in the Human Anatomy Lab

With humor, compassion, and wisdom, Howard Carter recounts the semester he spent watching first-year medical students in a human anatomy lab. From the tentative early incisions of the back, the symbolic weight of extracting the heart, and by the end, the curious mappings of the brain, we embark on a path that is at once frightening, awesome, and finally redemptive.

Howard Carter is a professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. He has written extensively on the interface of the humanities and medicine.

"A warmly engaging, cheerful and utterly winning book... as engrossing as any novel, as thoughtful as the most searching memoir, as suggestive as any contemporary scientific essay." --Fred Chappell, The Raleigh News & Observer

"Carter provides insight into a critical aspect of medical training, and an unusually intimate, even arresting, view of the bodies we have and the bodies we will become." --Publishers Weekly

"[A] compelling book...The author treats all parties, living and dead, with honesty, respect, and kindness throughout." --The Bloomsbury Review