Bare Bones: Walking with the dead

You might walk into the Morphology Museum, take one look at the carefully sliced body parts all around you and wish you'd stayed at home.

But go with it - there are few museums in the world that can shift the tectonic plates of what you think you know and believe. Four floors of specimens in formalin take you through the labyrinth of the human body.

Let me start with the babies because at least they are still intact. Some of them have been silenced in that liquid for four decades. Most are alone - suspended somewhere between birth and death by the spina bifida or hydrocephaly that made them unfit for life outside the womb.

But there were two - well, four actually - who fascinated me so much I almost found myself speaking to them: Two sets of conjoined twins forever locked in some type of familial interaction.

One set are host-and-parasitic twins, similar but different - like a human rendition of a penny farthing bicycle. The smaller one is attached to the bigger one's tummy.

The other set - the only specimen that brought me to tears - are conjoined twins curled in the softest embrace. One seems to be telling the other that it's all going to be okay. Or am I projecting here?

When I first walked in, I did wonder if it was all going to be okay. Seeing a face in a jar is not something I'm used to.

Turning a specimen around and seeing the cross-section of the brain isn't either.

But as I moved from one jar to the next, one floor to the next, one skinned body part to the next, I heard a soothing gurgle in my brain. This isn't a place where things snap into perspective - they slide into perspective with the grace of a lava lamp bubble.

I gazed upon the secret layers of our toes and feet without recoiling in the way I do if someone's bare foot accidentally touches me.

Feet, for me, are highly contentious things. They are signs that say, "we used to be monkeys and then got hold of the toolbox".

Seeing the collection of beautiful bones like some miniature roads-and-highways system encased in layers of flesh brings one word to mind: vulnerability.

All it would take is the smallest crush, or cancerous cell, or hot-sticky-tar road. I lingered at the feet, I admit, but I finally moved on.

In the next part of the visit I got to "unpack" a body that has been preserved in all its spongy glory. Everything is so perfectly held inside there. Not a wasted space.

By this stage, it felt normal to caress a brain or lift a lung. I made sure I put the nipple on the right way up, and I understood why the heart has a status like no other organ in life, love and literature.

Three hours later, back in the halls of "normality", live people seemed so odd - these hunks of sculptured flesh who draped their bodies in cloth and said "good morning", and "please sign yourself out of the building".

But what I heard them say was: "This is the brief part - the part where you get to choose what this hunk of meat does while it is alive".

That is what has stayed with me.

• The Medical Morphology Museum near Tygerberg Hospital, Cape Town, is open to school groups (grades 11 and 12 only), students and the public. Adults R50, students R20, by appointment with Lorraine Myburgh, lm52@sun.ac.za, 021-938-9426