In the first post of a new creative practice research series – ‘In Practice’ – Sabina Dosani – a medical doctor and writer – explores the tensions between biomedical knowledge and embodied subjectivity.
Embryology Lesson 1 (1993)
At the end of my first year at medical school I failed all my exams, except embryology. My first year had been disappointing. Afternoons seated at tables of eight, as if at a dinner party, around a cadaver, were not all I had hoped for. We had a “preparation for dissection” morning, where we sat, groups of school leavers and eight mature students, in circles, while an anatomist, a dentist-turned-priest, and a surgeon rotated among us.
We learned where the cadavers who lay in the dissection room came from. “All were donated, explicitly for this cause, while still living,” the anatomist said, keen to stress that grave-robbing was long in the past. The dentist-priest told us families would hold funerals after we had learned our anatomy. I remember thinking that this was a long time to remain in suspended grief, without a service or public farewell. We were cautioned to be respectful, “at all times”, and directed to “keep the Anatomy Atlas closed when travelling by public transport.” The Anatomy Atlas was a large photo book, in coffee-table format, of head-to-toe slices of cadavers and their organs, dissected; and the important anatomical landmarks, labelled. As we practiced looking nonchalant at dismembered people, their flesh pinned back to expose veins marked like motorways, someone read a poem by an anatomical donor, which began: “This is my body, the shell of my being, which is given to you in final offering to the world.” There were echoes of Christ’s broken body, the ultimate Christian sacrifice. How different these words were from the martial language I would hear in my clinical years: “we fought to keep him alive” or “she lost her battle.” After hearing the liturgical poem, we learned how to change a scalpel blade on our dissection knives without cutting our fingers.
Anatomy repelled me. Physiology was complicated. Microbiology, baffling. Biochemistry taught at such a rate that I regularly got left behind. I told myself that these pre-clinical years would pass and that my years on the wards were not long off. Colouring in images of embryos was one of the few pre-clinical activities that I enjoyed.
Embryology lectures were delivered to two hundred students in a naming-of-parts manner. We were given A4 sheets with line drawings. The same line drawing appeared on acetate on an overhead projector. Our lecturer, a woman with a large grey bun and bright blue glasses, squiggled on the acetates and named each blob and line. I loved it. It was like a weekly drama series, at the end of which there would be a baby. On autumnal evenings, I sat with sharpened pencils, bringing line drawings to life.
On week six, we were taught about the formation of the notochord.
“Those of you who believe in the soul, this is when the soul is said to enter the embryo. Before this, it’s not a life.”
Loving the colouring sheets provided, I was greedy for more. In a bookshop on Gower Street, I found the Embryology Coloring Book. On the front cover were two images: a small foetus, posed like a figure from a dolls-house, probably at the sixteen-week stage, and a ball of cells, a blastocyst.
Three hundred pages of embryos at various developmental stages followed. These line drawings were labelled in childish bubble writing. The theory was that colouring the labels as well as the diagrams would help kinaesthetic learners. In practice, colouring was relaxing, calming the jittery buzz in my brain and giving me a lasting awe of the beauty of embryonic development. Embryology colouring sheets also gave me one of the few legacies of my pre-clinical years. I can no longer recite the stages of the Krebs Cycle. The names of the bones of the foot elude me. But the names for each stage of the dance of life – zygote, morula, blastocyst, primitive streak, notochord, lens pits, nasal pits, ossification – whirl in my memory like childhood verse.
Embryology Lesson 2 (2014)
Entering the darkened room, removing my shoes and observing silence until I heard the foetal heartbeat, gave me the sense of partaking in something sacred, even magical. There was a theatrical aspect to the ultrasound examination, that began with entering the dimly-lit room, taking centre-stage on the examining couch, and continued with the ritual drawing back of the concertina-folded curtains surrounding the bed, and culminated in the audience of expectant mother and scanning professionals, gazing at the screen. Pregnant. The word made flesh.
After the reassurance of another normal scan, I grasped my printout like a potential jackpot-winning lottery ticket on the drive back home. In the image, my unborn looked tiny compared to the screen-sized projection I had just seen. For all the scrutiny my uterus had been under that morning, nobody enquired what sort of mother I was going to be to the unborn child. It’s rare to probe. It is what happens when things go wrong, after they have gone wrong. Most women don’t have fortnightly ultrasounds. It was extraordinary, this hyper-vigilance.
My three-year-old daughter was curious about the small monochrome print outs of the “baby in Mummy’s tummy,” and called these scan pictures “the dark photos.”
“You been late at work?”
“Went to the hospital. I’ve got another dark photo.”
“Well guess what? I got a picture too. Me and Issy painted our feet at nursery and we runned on big paper and we maked green feet prints.”
I showed her the scan while she wriggled her green toes.
“That never is a photo of a baby in your tummy. That’s a big blurry,” she said.
She was right. The ultrasound printout wasn’t a photo of my unborn baby, but a ghostly image of where my unborn’s presence had been sonographically sensed. It was an image of my body, but I wasn’t there. My ultrasound images are the only selfies I have in which I can’t see myself. Among all the obstetric scrutiny, I had disappeared.
And yet, my ten-week scan printout felt akin to a mother and infant portrait. If the ultrasound epitomised the obstetric gaze, reducing my uterine contents to an outcome or a diagnosis to be medically treated or surgically excised, at home, my fortnightly ultrasound images became mediators of my maternity. Somewhere in the shadows and light, I could see my unborn reclining like the infant on the cover of my medical school embryology colouring book. In the blur surrounding her, protecting her, nurturing her, was me, her mother.
My pregnancy was invisible. My unborn’s existence, her dependence on my uterine life-support, and my love for her, were unseen in the world. I kept the scan printout as proof, just as the foot painting was a material reminder of an afternoon of painting and running and playing. The painting of Issy’s feet was not literally her feet, it was an imprint. My daughter’s running really happened, she had the green blurred picture to prove it, which she held out and showed with pride. Later, when my husband was home, I showed him the scan image with similar pride and excitement. Here was our proof. I could have put it on social media, where I would have been seen as an expectant mother, without a shadow of a doubt.
Contextual note
My medical education frequently privileged a detached gaze—one that objectified the body as a site of pathology, diagnosis, and intervention, while devaluing patient knowledge as anecdotal or incomplete. My subsequent experiences of being the body under scrutiny complicated this epistemology. In Embryology Lessons, I explore the tensions between biomedical knowledge and embodied subjectivity, examining how my roles as doctor, patient, and mother intersect and at times conflict. My high-risk pregnancy, while biologically visible through obstetric imaging, is discursively rendered absent—reduced to medicalised milestones and risk assessments. Writing allows me to challenge this dichotomy, valorising the subjective, foregrounding relationality, especially the complexities of maternal attachment, in ways that clinical discourses often overlook.
About the author
Sabina is a Visiting Research Fellow in the department of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia. She is writing a novel and continues to work part-time as a consultant psychiatrist and expert witness.
About In Practice
‘In Practice’, The Polyphony’s creative practice research project, showcases multi-modal creative engagement with the lived experience of chronic illness, disability, caregiving and health from a range of creative practitioners within and beyond academic research. Founded by Aly Fixter and Grace Brimacombe-Rand, they wanted to bring their own creative practice and academic engagement with creative texts to the medical humanities digital community and foster new connections. If you are a creative person who explores their lived experience of health or the body through writing, art, photography or any creative methods, please get in touch to share your work with The Polyphony’s audience.
