During the following weeks, as I began to dissect the dead woman, I realised that my decision had been correct. I took part in undergraduate life, getting drunk on the river with the Addenbrookes nurses, playing tennis with my fellow Kingsmen, but in every other sense the university remained a foreign city. Sometimes I would wake in my rooms, roused by one of the endless voluntaries, and be unable to remember where I was. Then I would smell the faint traces of human fat and formalin on my hands and think of the woman in the dissecting room. I imagined her lying on the darkened table, as deep as pharaoh in her dream of death. Her calm presence presided over the cadavers and students alike. Exposing herself to young men with knives in their hands, she set a kind of order on my memories of the dead Chinese and Japanese I had seen during the war.

As the four student teams began to dissect this unknown woman, opening flaps of skin in her limbs, neck, and abdomen, she seemed to undress in a last act of self-revelation, unpacking herself of all the mortal elements in her life. Sitting beside her, I pared back the skin of her shoulder, dividing the muscles and exposing the nerves of her brachial plexus, the strings that had once moved her arms as she caressed her husband, brushed her hair, cradled her child. I tried to read her character in the scars beneath her chin, traces perhaps of a car accident, the once broken bridge of her strong nose, and the mole on her right temple which she may have disguised with a handsome blond wave. Pretending to read my Cunningham, the dissection handbook whose pages were now stained by the dead woman’s skin, I stared at her matronly hips and at the callouses on her left fingers, those of an amateur cellist…? As we opened the doors of her body, students and demonstrators working on other cadavers would pause behind us, drawn to this solitary woman among the dead men. She alone was treated to none of the lewd dissecting-room humour.

Hoping to identify her, I talked to the assistants in the preparation room and learned only that she had once been a physician. Almost all the cadavers were those of doctors who had donated their bodies before their deaths—it moved me to think that these dying men and woman had bequeathed themselves to the next generation of doctors, a great testimony to their spirit.