Tag: anatomy

Harika Kottakota Harika Kottakota (1 Posts)

Contributing Writer

UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine


Harika Kottakota is a medical student at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine in Los Angeles, California, class of 2025. In 2020, she graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelors of Science in Biology with Interdisciplinary Honors in Science, Technology, and Society. She has published her poetry both online and in print, including Pager Publications (forthcoming 2024), Los Angeles Global Health Conference (April 2024), Pegasus Physician Writers Press (2022) and American Medical Women’s Association (2021). She enjoys hiking, watching movies, reading historical fiction, comedy shows and finding the best coffee spots in town. In the future, Harika plans to pursue a career in pediatric neurology.




“Stories Unsaid, Yet Told”

– a spoken word piece dedicated to the generous donors and their families of the Donor Body Program at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine The air grows heavy from bearing the weight of all our questions and our intentions to learn, to transform into the healers we’ve sworn to become.   So often, I stand where the sun’s rays and fluorescent bulbs meld together. Where sounds renounce harmony – with papers rustling, and steel …

Dissecting Anatomy Lab: The Assembly of a Medical Student

In the golden glow of a fall day, 104 first-year medical students parade out of the medical center carrying boxes of bones to aide our anatomy lab studies. The crates look suspiciously like instrument cases, perhaps the size of an alto saxophone, and it feels absurd to march back to our houses a la The Music Man, knowing all the while that we are bringing real live (well, dead) human skeletons into our living rooms, kitchens and coat closets.

Dissecting Anatomy Lab: Introduction

Over the next four weeks, I will share a series of essays with you in which I tell some of those stories. This writing results from the work of a summer, supported by a summer research fellowship in Medical Humanities & Bioethics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, in which I interviewed nine first-year medical students, two third-year medical students, eight anatomy and medical humanities professors, two Anatomical Gift Program staff, three palliative care clinicians, two preregistered donors and one donor’s family member.

Life in a Line

Many honor their cadaver with the designation of being their “first patient.” Yet, the term “patient” implies the receipt of some benefit in the form of treatment or improved well-being. Throughout our time together, I treated my cadaver with nothing but careful and thoughtful desecration. Just several months earlier I had promised to do no harm. Yet, as my inexperienced hands repeatedly sliced through layers of tissue, I could not help but feel like an intruder stealing something that was never meant to be mine.

Nathan Sherman (2 Posts)

Contributing Writer

University of Arizona College of Medicine-Tucson


Nathan Sherman is a medical student at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Tucson.