In Vivo Veritas

Gaslight flickered along the tiled walls and danced across the faces of the professors in the gallery above, perched like birds of prey. A portly man stood in the first row and stared gravely down at Thomas. Thomas kept his eyes fixed on the man’s waistcoat button, which was threatening to burst at any moment. The man cleared his throat. “Mr. Greaves, it is a pleasure to see you come this far in your medical education. This nation finds itself in no small want of capable young physicians. I took up the profession myself in the years following the Great Rebellion, as my father did before me. And God knows we needed doctors in those days.”

Thomas stood stiffly straight, like he was about to march into war. His hands trembled under the cover of the examination table in front of him. As the professor continued droning on, Thomas’ eyes drifted to the row of windows ahead. The red-bricked campus stretched as far as the eye could see outside, with crimson leaves dotting the lawn between buildings. The leaves were the same color as the smeared blood on the ground from the previous exam. He knew it was there, but he dared not look now. He would look anywhere but downward until absolutely necessary. He took a deep breath and choked on the heavy taste of lye.

Then Thomas heard the dreaded word: “Begin.”

He lowered his gaze to the table in front of him. The exam subject before him was a young man, likely no older than twenty. Thomas could smell stale sweat and iron coming off the body. His long, black hair spilled across the table in a dark crown, trailing nearly to his waist. A breechcloth was tied loosely around his hips. Thick calluses formed along the base of the fingers and across the pads, the kind that came from years of handling tools. These were not the hands of a soldier, but of someone who built. He imagined the man building homes and tools. But faint marks traced the skin around the ankles in rough, symmetrical abrasions, as though rope had bitten into skin for too long. The flesh there was rawer than it should have been. Thomas tried not to think about what had caused the wounds.

A bruise stretched above the right cheekbone, its deep purple mingling with the specks of dirt clinging to the skin. Thomas reached out and touched the copper-colored cheek. The softness of the flesh startled him. He had heard that the school was getting a fresh supply from western territories, but he could’ve sworn the skin felt warm to the touch.

Thomas moved slowly, inspecting every inch of the specimen. Near the scalp, beneath the tangled hairline, he uncovered a wound—thin, jagged, and barely closed. The edges of the cut were uneven, the surrounding skin inflamed. It had not been cleaned, much less stitched. Whoever this man was, no one had tried to treat him. Thomas walked over to the other side of the table and paused. Near the lower ribs on the left side, there was a small, clean wound, no wider than a coin. The skin around it was intact with minimal bleeding. He searched the back but found no exit, only the neat puncture.

The air felt colder now than when he began. Thomas’ hand hovered in midair, unsure whether to reach again or retreat. The room was quiet except for the scribble of pencils and the ticking of the clock behind the gallery. He told himself to keep going. The body would not speak, and yet something about it refused to be silent. Above, a professor chuckled and whispered to his colleague that he could still smell the smoke from the raid.

Thomas kept his eyes on the body, but his mind drifted. He recalled a seminar from the previous winter, when Professor Bell had brought out a skull wrapped in yellowed linen. Along the temple, a faint cross had been carved into the bone. “Wampanoag male, twenty-six, executed,” the label had read. The students passed it from hand to hand like a textbook, noting the clean fracture along the jaw. No one had asked how it had come into the school’s possession. It had simply arrived, like everything else.

Now, with pencil in hand, Thomas began to write in his notepad. He avoided any mention of the temperature of the skin, the bruises, or the raw marks around the ankles. The facts he recorded were clean and defendable, just enough to fulfill the assignment and get one step closer to a position at one of the major hospitals. This was a male, likely an older adolescent. Evidence of recent trauma. Cause of death: gunshot wound to lower thoracic cavity. He kept his handwriting steady, though nothing about the body in front of him felt still.

He set the pencil down on the exam table and picked up the scalpel. With a nod, a young nurse came rushing to his side and picked up the pencil and notepad. He made an incision down the length of the torso and recited his findings to the nurse. The battery the body had been subjected to on the outside was reflected on the inner organs as well. When his inspection was complete, he cleaned the death off his hands in the basin of water nearby.

The professors conferred after the presentation was given. An old, slender professor who looked as if he was made of paper detached from the huddle and leaned over the railing. “Mr. Greaves, that was a commendable display of clinical judgment,” his voice boomed. “The university is pleased to endorse your work and shall recommend your placement with the highest distinction.”

Thomas pulled the corners of his mouth into a grin, but he couldn’t help but feel like he had been a part of something awful. As the nurse wheeled the exam table away, Thomas thought he saw the man’s jaw hang slightly open, as if it was waiting to speak. After the exam, Thomas remained in the hall long after the other students had gone. He stripped off his apron with care and folded it neatly, as if doing so might steady his thoughts. The nurse had already vanished down one of the corridors, the wheels of the exam table echoing faintly behind her. The scent of iron still clung to his hands, even after the second rinse.

He found his way to the records room in the basement, a place he had only visited once before during his first year. The walls were lined with shelves of neatly labeled files, grouped by illness, region, and date of death. He searched along the rows for anything that might connect to the man on his table, any document or a name. But there were no files for the new cadavers. No biographical sketches. No acquisition forms. He opened a drawer near the back of the room and found a single, leather-bound ledger. Inside, the pages held nothing but numbers. Three columns. Date. Quantity received. Quantity processed.

That morning’s entry read: October 21 – Received: 3 – Processed: 1

No origins. No names. No notes of consent or circumstance. Just numbers, counted and crossed through like inventory. Thomas closed the book and rested his hand on its rough cover. For a moment, he did not move. He couldn’t shake the image of the number one that corresponded to the blood on his hands. He straightened, left the ledger as he found it, and walked out into the late afternoon light.

Outside, the wind pulled dry leaves across the path. Thomas stepped onto the path and glanced toward the west gate. Three covered wagons were rumbling slowly away from the campus, their wheels groaning against the cobblestones. They had no markings. The drivers did not look back. One of the wagon flaps had come loose and was fluttering in the breeze. As it lifted, Thomas caught the brief sight of a bare leg bent at an unnatural angle inside.

He stood there until the wagons vanished into the tree line. Then he turned and walked back across the grass, head down, hands in his coat pockets. The wind pulled at the rust-colored leaves around him, sending them tumbling in every direction. Behind him, the facade of the medical building loomed, still and indifferent, its windows reflecting nothing. He did not speak of what he saw. Not to the faculty. Not to his classmates. Not even to himself. But for the rest of his life, whenever a patient asked whether the body remembers pain after death, Thomas would pause just for a breath before giving his answer.