The opening festival was over, and early in the following week he began the work of dissecting. He had previously bespoke of the College beadle what is known as “a part,” for be it known to the outside world that a well conditioned corpse having no friends to claim it after death in the hospital or workhouse which saw its owner’s last moments, is by the Anatomy Act permitted, under certain legal restrictions, to be used for dissection. To preserve it for the length of time it will require for some six or eight men daily working at it to unravel all its mysteries of muscle, nerve, artery, and vital organs, its blood vessels are injected by an ingenious process by the dissecting room porters with a preservative fluid which, permeating every part of the body, keeps it fairly fresh and arrests decay till the scalpel of the young anatomist has revealed all it has to teach. Let us enter into the dissecting room of St. Bernard’s, and see how our future doctors learn to deal with the ailments our flesh is heir to. It is a spacious chamber, some fifty feet long by thirty feet wide; its floor is slate, cold, and non-absorbent; its walls half-way up of the same impervious material; it has no windows, but is lighted by a glass roof and many gas jets for dark days. On either side are eight strong tables, on each of which lies a corpse. Round each table are several heavy, well-made stools; they need be heavy. They are often subject to rough usage at the hands of their occupants when not engaged in more scientific work. On this first of October, all the “subjects,” as they are technically called, are untouched by the knife; in a few days they will scarcely be recognisable as having ever been our brothers and sisters of the mortal life. The busy scalpel of the anatomy student will be engaged on every limb and feature in “getting out,” as it is termed, his “part.” Then the observant eye of a man of science would see how fearfully and wonderfully we are made. The Psalmist could have had but a faint idea how much his beautiful phrase conveyed. Here are displayed for us the exquisite sets of muscles and tendons that enable us to move our hands and arms. This part shows the nerve and blood supply of the leg, and that one the machinery by which we smile, laugh, or express our wonder and surprise. Here is a man at work seeking to unfold the marvellous convolutions of the brain, while at another table one has got down to the articulations of the foot, and is showing the pulleys and joints that enable us to walk. The art of anatomical dissection consists in freeing the muscles, tendons, arteries, veins, and nerves from the surrounding fat and connective tissue which in the living body preserves and covers them.