"The body was never a free gift; it gives temporary shelter to our aspirations on a finite lease. We try to preserve and commemorate its tenure. In our age of increasingly narrow technology, we still begin with the body, the province of schools of art and schools of medicine, heirs to our first struggles against mortal limits. These schools cloister optimism. Medical students press through the aromatics of bioled linen, disinfectant, and formaldehyde, making the rounds of formal lectures, half-draped patients, and stripped cadavers. They study the body to improve its fate. Art students, half-nourished by a miasma of primed linen, turpentine, and chalk, study the undraped model in life class, practice the diagrams of geometric perspective, and memorize the skeleton and muscles in anatomy. Some may yet learn to convey ideas as convincing images for the empathetic response of an audience. With kindred presumptions of benefice, the doctor studies the body to improve its fate; the artist to improve its spirit."
-from The Art of Anatomy by Benjamin A. Rifkin
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