Chapter G
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had kept begging Buddy to show me some really interestinghospital sights, so one Friday I cut all my classes and came down fora long week-end and he gave me the works. I started out by dressing in a white coat and sitting on a tall stoolin a room with four cadavers, while Buddy and his friends cut themup. These cadavers were so unhuman-looking they didn’t bother mea bit. They had stiff, leathery, purple-black skin and they smelt likeold pickle jars. After that, Buddy took me out into a hall where they had somebig glass bottles full of babies that had died before they were born.The baby in the first bottle had a large white head bent over a tinycurled-up body the size of a frog. The baby in the next bottle wasbigger and the baby next to that one was bigger still and the babyin the last bottle was the size of a normal baby and he seemed to belooking at me and smiling a little piggy smile. I was quite proud of the calm way I stared at all these gruesomethings. The only time I jumped was when I leaned my elbow onBuddy's cadaver’s stomach to watch him dissect a lung. After aminute or two I felt this burning sensation in my elbow and itoccurred to me the cadaver might just be half alive since it was stillwarm, so I leapt off my stool with a small exclamation. Then Buddyexplained the burning was only from the pickling fluid, and I satback in my old position. In the hour before lunch Buddy took me to a lecture on sickle cellanaemia and some other depressing diseases, where they wheeledsick people out on to the platform and asked them questions andthen wheeled them off and showed coloured slides. One slide I remember showed a beautiful laughing girl with ablack mole on her cheek. “Twenty days after that mole appeared thegirl was dead; the doctor said, and everybody went very quiet for a
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