It's as if they had to humanize her before they did things to her that would be taboo, criminal even, without the saving grace of medical training.
"The skin of the chest pulls back easily after we have made the incisions, and the body opens like a book."
"The body is staggeringly complex, and to understand it with any degree of completeness demands dealing with the thing itself -- picking up and holding the heart, tracing the path of an artery by threading a pipe cleaner through its lumen."
"[We] removed her heart and lungs from her body, tying them in a brown-black garbage bag. ... Her rib cage falls to the table as we turn her, and one of her removed breasts lies out to the side of her, facing the ceiling as she lies facedown."
