It’s not unreasonable to expect that the anatomy syllabus for a medical degree should include breasts.
Last year I performed full-body dissection as part of my training to become a doctor. After timid first incisions to the arm, we students were entrusted with opening the chest cavity. Two obstacles blocked the way. I looked in the course manual for directions about how to cut — through? around? underneath? But there was no mention of these pleasure-giving, milk-yielding, cancer-visited organs.
One justification for the vast expense of cadaveric dissection is to develop a clinical understanding of the body in its supposed entirety. Omitting the breasts reflects a way of thinking — from which medicine has not yet matured — that still sees the female form as a detour from the human standard.
In This Mortal Coil, Fay Bound Alberti argues that the study of ‘anatomy is not merely a biomedical discipline, but also a philosophical endeavour’, to which I would add that it is also crucially political.
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