Saws and Chisels

Warning: this post could be disturbing to some.

Several times now, we've had to cut through bones in anatomy lab to get to what we want to look at. The first time was in the thorax, where we had to break off the ribs so we could look inside and see the heart and lungs and stuff. This involved using a pair of giant wire cutters ("bone cutters," sure) to snap the ribs at both ends with a loud crack. We left the muscles and everything in place, so that the thoracic wall makes a little flap that we can lift to peek into the thorax. How cute.

We only needed to go through bone one other time last semester, to see the spinal cord, and the rest of the bone sawing has been happening this semester. You see, this semester, we've spent seven weeks just looking at the head. There's a lot to see! Unfortunately a lot happens to be inside the head.

The thing that really made me want to tell a story about all this bone stuff is the noise. I already described the wire cutter bone cutters, but clearly that's not going to work very well for something like a skull. Our other options are saws and chisels.

My group likes to use the saw. It's completely barbaric feeling, but it gets the job done. The saws we have are these square things about as long as your forearm, that aren't too far off from this frightening picture I got from google:

I'm sure you know how a saw sounds. Schrrck-schrrck-schrrck-schrrck. Usually we have one person sawing and the other four trying to hold the cadavre still. Sometimes we have everything dissected away and are right down on the bone, and sometimes we're just flat out sawing through the face or some such thing. That's always a little weird feeling.

A lot of other groups like to use chisels. I know this because you can hear a dozen chisels clinking away throughout the room. If you stop to listen, it sounds just like shop class. Chink, chink, schrrck-schrrck-schrrck, chink, clunk, clink, chink!

That said, what is it we're actually doing? As much as it might sound like it, we're not just tearing the face apart. The first sawing/chiseling we had to do was so we could get a good look at the jaw, and later we carefully took out a section of the muzzle, but the best was definitely when it was time to look at the brain. Despite having giant, unwieldy saws, we needed to plan and cut very carefully. You probably noticed that skulls are round, not square, and it's definitely not a good idea to start sawing into the brain. When we finally prised off the cranium, we learned that we had to then go hack off bone around the spinal cord so we could actually cut the brain stem and get the brain out. It was a long day.

At the end of the day, as normal and reasonable as it may have been at the time, it just does not do to try and tell your non-vet friends how you sawed a dog's face in half today.